Category: FWIW

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Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose?

Or is this “Déjà vu all over again?” *heh*

Now the guy who “wrote the book” on safe passwords has changed his tune and is now advocating using long passphrases.

The thing is, I’ve advocated this sort of thing off and on for years, here at this lil Third World County blog, because it’s an easy-peasy way to have long, complicated “passwords” that are easy to remember. I’ve even posted hints on how folks can “crack” my “passwords”

Hint: many of them are based on, but deliberately do not accurately reproduce, verses from 16th-to-19th Century art or folk songs in any one of six languages, and frequently run well over 64 characters. None of them spell all the words out correctly, and many do not use any of the actual words at all. Go ahead. Crack ’em. For me, they are easy-peasy to remember, though, ‘cos I can just “sing” the songs in my head as I type the passphrases, and because I am an “Odd,” the substitutions I use make sense to me but would seem almost psychotically delusional to “Normals”–or computers.

(Example of “Odd” perceptions/views of reality not directly related to my passphrase substitutions: numbers and mathematical functions have colors, shapes, and positions in 3D space for me. It’s how I “see” mathematical solutions without following steps in formulas. In a similar vein, word substitutions in art/folk song lyrics in foreign languages are “colored” and “shaped” by how I see and hear the words in my mind’s eyes and ears. So, easy to recall, for me, difficult to reproduce for any Normal or logical process.)

So, as I have said, have fun cracking my passwords. I’m sure there are some really Odd folks out there, somewhere, who’d enjoy doing just that. 🙂

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Silly Question

In a paragraph about noticing and recalling details, a writer asked,

“If someone asked you the last time you wore something blue, you’d be hard pressed to give an exact date and time, right?”

Wrong. I usually wear blue jeans. When I wear a suit, I usually wear a blue Oxford shirt with it, or a white Oxford shirt and a tie, almost always with some blue in it, to pick up the blue in the suit (yeh, after years of having a closet full of suits, sport coats, etc., I have pared things down to a couple of sport coats–one of them navy blue–and one suit, mainly just for weddings and funerals). Slacks and shirt? Usually a blue shirt.

This one would be easy-peasy.

Now, the last time I wore yellow. . .

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English. Learn Some.

Building an AR-15 Under 5 Pounds

Nice article, and reads like a nice build. I do lack a bit of confidence in their math, though, given that the build they were comparing to was 5lb5oz and ~$3,500 while the 4lb13oz build was “slightly more than $1,800, nearly half the price of the carbine in the article that spawned this exercise.”

“[N]early half the price”? No, slightly MORE than half the price. “Nearly” implies “almost” or “not quite,” and $1,800 is more than half of $3,500.

Numbers. Language. Not strong suits for this writer.

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Understanding “Gender”

To properly understand the many different fantasy “genders” that have come about in recent years, a trip down etymology lane might be helpful:

“gender (n.)
c. 1300, “kind, sort, class, a class or kind of persons or things sharing certain traits,” from Old French gendre, genre “kind, species; character; gender” (12c., Modern French genre), from stem of Latin genus (genitive generis) “race, stock, family; kind, rank, order; species,” also “(male or female) sex,” from PIE root *gene- “give birth, beget,” with derivatives referring to procreation and familial and tribal groups. ”

When speaking of _mankind_**, then, one can speak now of three specific “genders”:

male
female
batsh*t crazy.

The last class is the catch-all for all the delusional folks who are in denial of reality and claim to be some weird fantasy “gender.”
___________________________

**”mankind” here is a poke in the eye to snowflake “batsh*t crazies”

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The Reasons I Do Not Carry a Handgun

Sure, I have the right to carry openly or concealed (and I have), but there are several reasons why I do not normally, habitually, carry a handgun on my person.

I’m gettin’ old, folks. Arthritis and difficulty quickly transitioning between near and far make sighting/aiming and firing a handgun an exercise in “maybe accuracy,” and that’s just not good enough to assure NOT hitting what I do not want to.

I also live in one of the safest places in the world, safer from physical attacks on my person than almost anywhere else in America that has people in it. *heh* That means that others around me are also pretty darned unlikely to experience physical aggression initiated against them (by anyone other than law enFARCEment ossifers, that is).

Sidebar: perhaps one of the reasons it’s so safe here in America’s Third World County™ is that firearms of all kinds outnumber inhabitants by quite a healthy margin, and many folks do carry a handgun both openly and concealed. Gives me warm fuzzies. 🙂

The only reason I might carry a handgun, given my circumstances, would be if I were to go out walking in “snake country” or “feral pig country,” and in that case, I’d probably need to carry a S&W Governor loaded in alternate chambers with .410 gauge shotshells and .45 long colt (each for a different contingency). The .410 (loaded with birdshot, for snake use) would pretty much obviate concerns about really fine aiming, though I’d just have to hope for decent enough luck if a feral pig got his mad on.

Still, even in such cases, I’d probably prefer to keep my head on a swivel and note issues well enough in advance to back away from a venomous snake or take to a tree in case of a feral pig.

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Gibberish, Gobbledegook, and Glop

Economics. *sigh* Just another field that HAS to use words in idiosyncratic ways in order to attempt to make its jargon less acceptable to the hoi polloi. Example: in common speech “rival” and “competitor” are synonyms. In Economics, however, a good (yeh, another one, but with strong etymological roots) is rival if its use or consumption by one party denies another party its use or consumption.

Fugetaboutit.

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Something Different

I own a little revolver that is. . . different in several ways from the norm.

It’s a lil .32 ACP revolver that uses a round designed for .32 semi-automatics.

It is from a defunct maker of second-tier-quality knock-offs of other maker’s guns.

It’s a top-break revolver (semi-unusual nowadays).

It is one of very few the manufacturer made in this caliber with a six-round cylinder. By far, most of the .32 caliber revolvers made by this maker were 5-round.

Before it came to be in my possession, it had been fired only once, in 1929, by a man who committed suicide after the stock market crash. In the 84 years that intervened between that event and me coming into possession of the gun, no one else put a single round through it, and aside from two small spots of surface corrosion, the gun was in pristine condition, the bluing–apart from those two small spots–still perfect.

It’s a pretty good lil plinker, and ammo for the thing abounds, but I mostly just leave it cleaned, oiled, and in its case. I don’t really have a use for it aside from plinking, though I also have a nice lil IWB holster (that I picked up for ~$29 less than retail–$1–at my local “fell off the back of a truck” store) so I could, if I wanted, carry it concealed. . . if I wanted to, which–.32 ACP?–I do not.

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The Essential Key to a Long, Healthy Life

Choose your grandparents wisely. *heh*

I am very fortunate to have only one prescription med. (At my age, that’s more than a bit atypical, I know; I’m very, very fortunate.) The thing is, my Wonder Woman is prescribed the same med, same dosage, as a part of her _wide array_ of prescription meds.

She gets all hers from a local pharmacy using her employer-provided health insurance prescription drug benefit. I make a trip ~15 miles out of town once a year to pick up a year’s supply (Yeh, I brow-beat my doctor into writing it for 360 tabs, which–given my roughly 80% compliance–means I have about eight months’ backup supply, after all these years on the same med) at a discount pharmacy, using no insurance.

My cost is 1/6 her cost, after her co-pay.

(The point isn’t where she likes to buy her prescription meds. It’s still pretty cheap, so I don’t really care where she buys her meds. Wherever she’s comfortable doing so is just fine by me. It’s her decision, after all, anyway.)

As I said up front, I consider myself VERY fortunate to only “require” one prescription med for a condition I could take care of myself, and used to, with about 20 minutes of slow, controlled breathing twice a day, but I told my doctor that was just boring and requested a chemical solution.

I took GREAT care selecting my grandparents. . .

All I really have to deal with concerning health issues are creeping arthritis and this damnable tinitus. Oh, well, for the one I can lie to myself and say that pain is just weakness leaving the body. It doesn’t work, but it makes me laugh at myself. For the other, well, I just call my tinitus “the voices in my head” (Oh! those dulcet, belltoned ‘voices’! #gagamaggot), and blame it for my various insanities.

*heh*