FJ Cruiser: Shakedown Cruise...

Yesterday morning I finished putting on the last of the skid plates (the four lower link skids).  The FJ's “armor” is complete!  And that meant it was time for a shakedown cruise to test all this stuff and work out any rattles, loose bolts, etc.

I decided to start out with a route we know well: entering near Banner, we made a loop of the Rodriguez Canyon road and Oriflamme Canyon road.  In past years, the Rodriguez Canyon road was by far the more rugged – but this year, extensive erosion on the lower reaches of Oriflamme Canyon road gives that route the edge.  No matter, the FJ took it all in stride with ease and equanimity.  We scraped a skid just twice, showing off the FJ's high clearance.  We had a chance to exercise crawl mode, the A-Trac positive traction system, the rear differential lock, and of course basic four wheel drive; all performed flawlessly. 

Today I get to crawl under the FJ and see what needs tightening, and maybe do a little touch-up painting.  Oh, what fun :)

Along the way we saw a few wildflowers, actually unexpected at this late date.  Some of these were quite beautiful.  The tiny little blue ones were my favorite; they covered the ground in a few places like a blue gas hugging the ground.  As always, click to enlarge.  BTW, these were taken with my iPhone – that's an amazingly nice camera for its size...

Dancing Granny...

Via Rachel Lucas, this is a slightly different version of a video I've posted before.  But what the hell, it's still wonderful :)

Consumer Reports Really, Really Likes the Tesla Model S...

They note with some regret the 200 mile limitation, but otherwise they make the Tesla Model S sound like basically the perfect car:

Math-for-Programming Primers...

Here's a nice collection of very terse math primers on a bunch of different math topics that are frequently used in programming...

Benghazi...

Several readers have emailed to ask me why I'm not commenting on this story.  Mainly it's because there's nothing for me to add.  The entire disgusting, sickening story is now emerging.  I still have no intuition whether the main culprits (Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, in my view) will be held to account.  I certainly hope so, but I can't say I'm optimistic about that.  But even that emotion is completely dwarfed by something else I'm feeling: an overwhelming sense of despair and resignation about politics sublimating everything good about my country.  It's getting to the point where it's difficult to imagine anything short of a revolution effecting a cure.  Another Thatcher or Reagan, perhaps...though I don't see anyone like that emerging.

Peggy Noonan has a good piece in today's Wall Street Journal discussing Benghazi.  Here's her summary of the affair:

The Obama White House sees every event as a political event. Really, every event, even an attack on a consulate and the killing of an ambassador.

Because of that, it could not tolerate the idea that the armed assault on the Benghazi consulate was a premeditated act of Islamist terrorism. That would carry a whole world of unhappy political implications, and demand certain actions. And the American presidential election was only eight weeks away. They wanted this problem to go away, or at least to bleed the meaning from it.

Because the White House could not tolerate the idea of Benghazi as a planned and deliberate terrorist assault, it had to be made into something else. So they said it was a spontaneous street demonstration over an anti-Muhammad YouTube video made by a nutty California con man. After all, that had happened earlier in the day, in Cairo. It sounded plausible. And maybe they believed it at first. Maybe they wanted to believe it. But the message was out: Provocative video plus primitive street Arabs equals sparky explosion. Not our fault. Blame the producer! Who was promptly jailed.

If what happened in Benghazi was not a planned and prolonged terrorist assault, if it was merely a street demonstration gone bad, the administration could not take military action to protect Americans there. You take military action in response to a planned and coordinated attack by armed combatants. You don't if it's an essentially meaningless street demonstration that came and went.

The rest of her piece is interesting as well.

The current Crowder (with a guest appearance by Andrew Klavan) is also an effective summary.


You know this all means we need:

   Rope (lots of it).
   Trees (an entire forest full of them).
   Bureaucrats and their leaders (an administration full of them).
   Some assembly required.

Oh, That's Gonna Leave a Mark!

Let's say that you're a big government organization.  Let's say that you have an application where your computers really, really need to be reliable.  Like, say, NASA's computers on the International Space Station.  What's the absolute last operating system you would choose for those computers?

Everyone I know in IT or programming would instantly say “Windows!”.  Naturally, NASA chose Windows.  Windows XP, to be precise.

But...even NASA eventually got tired of crashing, virus-vulnerable computers.  They just switched to Linux (Debian 6). 

Somewhere a Microsoft salesperson is being boiled in oil while Bill Gates stirs and Steve Ballmer piles on the coal...

The True Culprit...

Megan McArdle does what she does best: a merciless beating applied to a government agency.  A sample:

Central States is in particularly bad shape, but it's far from alone.  A whole lot of the big union pension plans are in trouble.  This is usually cited as an example of The Trouble With Unions, or alternatively, The Scandalous Underregulation of the Private Sector.  As I dug into the details though, I found out something that surprised me: this wasn't just a story about union mismanagement.  And it wasn't a story about deregulation, either.  Oh, to be sure, the funds could have managed things better (more about that in a little while).  But the reason that they're in such deep trouble now is neither bad management, nor inadequate regulation.  In fact, the opposite is true: managers wanted to do a better job, and the government actively stopped them.  Meet the true culprit behind the crisis in union pension plans: the friendly folks at the IRS.  

You really should read the whole thing...

I Don't Need Any Reinforcement...

I don't need any reinforcement of the disdain I have for our president, Barack Hussein Obama.  But just in case you do, go read this.

As Simon says, the expression on Buzz Aldrin's face says it all...