Off-Topic / Dumping Thread

[tep392]

3 minutes ago, Asmusr said:

Thank you for the explanation. Would it be reasonable to inform people if you delete their posts? 

It's an option if I think it might not be obvious to them.

[+OLD CS1]

[+arcadeshopper]

[+OLD CS1]

The hurricane models show us as being pretty safe.  The precipitation and wind forecast models, however, tell a little bit of a different story.  If this holds, Wednesday is going to be a busy day for me.

 

[jrhodes]

☕

[+OLD CS1]

Local winds are now averaging 3mph, with gusts to 5mph.  It has begun.

[+OLD CS1]

I just looked up more forecasting.  I am going to get a ton of rain, but if these forecasts hold, the wind is going to be hardly anything to worry about, and the storm is going to loop around us like Hurricane Frances did.

 

Frances, 2004:

 

Idalia wind forecast, 8am and 11am, 30-Aug-2023:

 

 

[+OLD CS1]

It has been so boring and forever taking!  Some good winds a while back, but then dead for a looooong time.  We are still not quite in the main storms, just in between two outer bands.  It has apparently tightened up and gained strength, expected to hit as a category four hurricane.  I am still not expecting to take a direct hit, just a glancing blow off the east, but even the wind forecast is nuts.

 

A little neat thing I learned about Tallahassee a while back.  They (smart people) went to Atlanta and did some war gaming with the weather and predicted that if we took a direct hit from a category three storm, we would be without most utility services for up to 18 months, half of the homes in the city would be destroyed or damaged beyond livability and never rebuilt, over half of business would close permanently, and we would suffer more than 50% infrastructure loss.

 

I am assuming that accounts for the 22 mile distance from the coast and roughly 150ft elevation.  I am not surprised, considering the effects of Hurricane Hermine: 80% of our communications infrastructure was down for several days; while power was out city-wide initially, about a third of the area was brought up quickly, other areas were brought back up slowly (I regained power on the third day,) with some areas without power for months; amazing amount trees down.

 

Aftermath of Hurricane Hermine
Left: Old St. Augustine Rd. seen from Southwood Plantation Rd.

Right: Large tree uprooted at entrance to Florida Department of Emergency Management on Shumard Oak Blvd.

 

I need to get to bed and catch a little shut-eye, but I can never sleep leading up to a hurricane.  Morning is going to be busy.  See ya'll on the flip-side!

[+Atari2600PAL]

Keep safe @OLD CS1 (and anyone else in its path)

[+OLD CS1]

4 hours ago, Atari2600PAL said:

Keep safe @OLD CS1 (and anyone else in its path)

I have not checked elsewhere, but this has been a bit of a dud for me.  Several medium-sized branches are down in the yard and on the roof, but that seems to be the extent of it.  Only about two and three-quarters inches of rain, which I expected will go up, and the best wind gust I have seen was 25 mph a little bit ago, with the highest sustained at 16mph for short period of time.  Pressure dipped to 29.04inHg and is rising. My customer site in the path of the storm is off-line, and a couple of customers here in town are having some issues.

[+InsaneMultitasker]

 

[+mizapf]

This reminds me of a funny thing at our university in Nuremberg.

 

Our university (of applied sciences, as fully named) carries the name of Georg Simon Ohm, who everyone knows from resistors, the unit symbol being Ω. Georg Simon Ohm was the headmaster of the predecessor institute that was founded 1823. As you see, we had our 200 years anniversary this year.

 

So the headmasters of the university called for a professional PR agency to find a suitable focus for the years to come, and how to present it in public. Since there are many competing institutions in the area, a clear message was sought.

 

So the agency delivered some concepts. Most things were acceptable; one of the more annoying things was a change of the university logo (which means changing all slides, letter templates, business cards etc.) and the change of the color scheme.

 

However, one thing was a plain failure, and it was the new motto. The agency, obviously unaware of physical details, created this lyrical masterpiece: "Ohm - unit of potential".

 

It is quite clear that the PR agency planned this as an ambiguous statement - potential for new scientific achievements, cooperations, whatever. What made all people in the more technical institutes facepalm was the literal, and blatantly wrong statement. Ohm is a unit of resistance, not of potential. This is Volt. The potential difference is better known as electric tension or simply voltage. Too bad you cannot formulate a catchy phrase with "resistance" in it. 😄

[+Atari2600PAL]

“Resistance is futile?” Worked for the Borg…

[SteveB]

50 minutes ago, mizapf said:

Too bad you cannot formulate a catchy phrase with "resistance" in it

"Our lectures are unresistable..." ?

[+TheBF]

7 hours ago, mizapf said:

Too bad you cannot formulate a catchy phrase with "resistance" in it. 😄

"Removing resistance to education since 1823" 😁

[+mizapf]

See, all good suggestions for free, and I don't want to know what they paid the PR agency for that service.

[+OLD CS1]

On 9/2/2023 at 1:26 PM, mizapf said:

So the agency delivered some concepts. Most things were acceptable; one of the more annoying things was a change of the university logo (which means changing all slides, letter templates, business cards etc.) and the change of the color scheme.

We at Florida State University feel this pain.  The change in our school emblem was universally panned by fans, alumni, students, and the Seminole Boosters (members, at least.)  The school partnered with Nike for a modern revamp, without consulting let alone notifying "us."  Once people found out it was too late, and in response to the backlash the athletic department issued a statement pretty much telling us all to f-off.  As a result, I and many people I know have completely boycotted any products with the new Nike-ified logo.

On 9/2/2023 at 1:26 PM, mizapf said:

However, one thing was a plain failure, and it was the new motto. The agency, obviously unaware of physical details, created this lyrical masterpiece: "Ohm - unit of potential".

I rolled my eyes so much I had to chase them down the hallway.  I hate it when schools/businesses/companies/&c. bring in outside people who have no connection at all to the subject matter.  In our case, many of the student submissions to fix the screw up of our school emblem were far, far better than what Nike produced.

[+jedimatt42]

That was clearly a missed opportunity to build real future alumni pride. Which is probably worth more money over the long term than the marketing stunt.

[+jedimatt42]

My employer has done this motto nonsense in the past, and now we are busy at the last minute removing the motto from marketing images inside installers and login pages and login error pages, and...

 

As an engineer, feels real productive (sarcasm)

 

 

[jrhodes]

[Geoff Oltmans]

@OLD CS1

 

We returned home from a trip to Orlando a few days ago. Our route took us via Perry and about 13 miles away from where it made landfall. We got to see the before and after on the way down and back. Hopefully everyone affected can recover quickly.

Edited September 7, 2023 by Geoff Oltmans

[+OLD CS1]

On 9/7/2023 at 10:17 AM, Geoff Oltmans said:

@OLD CS1

 

We returned home from a trip to Orlando a few days ago. Our route took us via Perry and about 13 miles away from where it made landfall. We got to see the before and after on the way down and back. Hopefully everyone affected can recover quickly.

Things are coming along down there.  Power and tree crews are working long shifts to get utility infrastructure back running.  A large part of the town regained power this past week.  When I run down to see my customer, I stop by the gas station to hear the scuttlebutt.  I talked to one the ComCast crew and was told they are having problems with the power crews cutting areal fiber for no reason, so they are having to go back and fix areas which were fixed once or twice, already.

 

This weekend I have to work up some way to pierce Verizon's carrier NAT to get at least incoming email traffic working.  This is the worst Internet outage they have had in the area in the eight or ten years I have been doing work for them.

[+OLD CS1]

I have been unable to get through Verizon's network with an IPsec VPN.  This would have allowed my customer's email server a back-end to my mail gateways.  I worked on this for days trying to figure out what was going on, which is that no phase-1 negotiation was ever initiated.

 

What to do?  Well, good-old SSH to the rescue.  An SSH tunnel between the customer mail server to one of my Unix machines, using a reverse (remote) port forward, then defining a new mailer in Sendmail.  My gateways can now take in this email, route it to this particular server which can then send the email through the SSH tunnel.

 

Screw you, Verizon.

[+mizapf]

Is that carrier-grade NAT part of DSLite, or is that just another thing that one of the bosses deemed important? I know about CGN from the DSLite concept.

[+OLD CS1]

3 hours ago, mizapf said:

Is that carrier-grade NAT part of DSLite, or is that just another thing that one of the bosses deemed important? I know about CGN from the DSLite concept.

I assume it is in our context with Verizon and the 4G/5G networks.  We are not offered IPv6 addresses via our uplink.

 

Notwithstanding, I have run into CGN issues for a very long time, like back when AT&T was still GPRS.  I have no idea if they were migrating to IPv6 or if there was preparation at the time, but I do know part of the stated issue was trying to bring more devices into limited IPv4 space.

 

We also had a national dial-up POP service which used it.  This aggravated the few customers of ours who wanted to run dynamic IP-based services on their dial-ups outside of our local area.