LinLog

On a lighter note this weekend, here's a "funny because it's true" parody blog entry from earlier this year.  It pretty well sums up the sometimes-rampant insanity in the software industry.  You know, where literally every startup thinks they're Facebook or Google and is going to go from zero to sixty-three quadrillion hits a day, so, well, you have to be ready for that kind of scale on day one.

Of course, approximately 90% of those startups will be out of business in less than five years, but hey, you never know, right?  After all, the entire business model is "get big so you can IPO or get bought out".  Sure, you could try to build a profitable, medium-sized business, but that's basically the same thing as failure.  Besides, if you can attract venture capital, it's not your money you're blowing through anyway, so who cares?

The good news is that the industry seems to be moving away from that mindset a little bit in the last few years.  Or, at least, things seem to be moving more toward business-to-business sales, as opposed mass-market products that have no clear business plan beyond "get huge".  So maybe that's a good sign and this idea of copying every crazy/innovative thing that the big boys are doing will be a thing of the past soon.

Or maybe not.  But I can dream.

This week, a note to my future self: undoing a USB drive that was flashed with a bootable image is a pain in the neck.

This week my wife wanted a USB thumb drive so she could take some documents to her mother's house and print them out using her printer, because ours is a pain in the neck and it's out of ink.  Well, the good news is that I had two drives handy!  The bad news is that neither of them did anything when I plugged them into her computer.

Of course, it turns out that, at some point, I'd used both of these as bootable drives for a something Linux-based.  This means, of course, that Windows can't read the partitions, so it can't write files to them.  In fact, when I plugged the drives in, nothing happened - they didn't even show up in Explorer.  So I had to fix them.

Well, the first one was pretty easy.  I just used the "Disk Management" console (a.k.a. diskmgmt.msc).  Using that, I was able to see the disk and it's partitions.  It was then a simple matter of deleting the existing partitions, creating a new one, and formatting it.  Then Windows found the drive just fine.

That didn't work so well for the second disk.  The drive showed up with an EFI partition and a lot of unallocated space.  I tried to create a partition in that space, but it didn't work.  So I eventually ended up downloading Rufus.  This is a handy tool that I've used in the past to image USB drives with ISO images.  Well, it can also do a plain-old reformat of a drive.  I just selected "unbootable" for the boot image, GPT for the partition type, and told it to format.  Rufus successfully blew away the entire drive and gave me back a fresh, working USB drive.

So the process wasn't too bad.  It's just a matter of realizing what's going on and getting an appropriate tool to fix it.

It's time for the obligatory annual birthday post!

This year, we didn't do anything fancy.  We just celebrated with a simple picnic lunch in the park by Canadaigua Lake and a trip to Sonnenberg Gardens, followed by some ice cream from Cheshire Farms Creamery.  We also had cake from Phillips European the night before, so I didn't go without birthday cake.  (I guess that's a little fancy - they have exceptional cake.  My wife and I get cake from there for our anniversary every year.)

This was the first time I've been able to get to the gardens this year.  I had been hoping to go in June when the roses were in bloom, but that didn't work out.  The grounds are pretty big and I enjoy just walking around them.  It's nice to get out in nature, and the beautiful assortment of flowers and other plants they have enhances the experience.  

I was afraid we were going to get rained out this time, but we managed to time our trip perfectly.  Dark clouds were threatening when we had lunch, but the sun came out while we were at the gardens.  The clouds came back as we were on our way out of the gardens and headed to the creamery, but the rain didn't start until we were literally getting into the car after finishing our ice cream.  All in all, a very nice, restful day.

For my own future reference, and for the benefit of any fellow residents of New York State, here are a few links to some useful information on coronavirus cases.

• This page from the Syracuse Post-Standard has a nice collection of graphs of new and total tests and positives, including an interactive map and chart showing total positives and deaths by county.
• This page from the New York Times has similar graphs and maps, but with trend data rather than just totals.

The thing I like about these pages is that they're broken down by county.  We all know that the number of cases and infection rates vary by state, but it's important to remember that they also vary within the state.  This is useful for judging the relative risk of activities based on where you are.

In general, the more rural counties have lower infection rates than those with major cities.  In fact, the virus is practically absent from some of the more rural counties.  Does this mean you can just ignore the pandemic?  No.  But it's useful information to include in your risk assessments.  Maybe knowing that the infection rate in your area is very low will take some weight off your mind.  Or maybe you can take a vacation or a long weekend in a county with a very low rate and do some of those activities that you might not feel comfortable with at home.

But that's just my two cents.  As always with the pandemic, decisions have trade-offs and we're operating with incomplete information.  All we can do is to try our best to think clearly, assess the risks and rewards of the choices available to us, and make the best decision we can with what we have at the time.

We have a bunch of stuff going on in the next week, so I'm taking a couple of days off for an early birthday semi-celebration.  In that spirit, rather than something technical, this week's post is about chipmunks.

If you haven't noticed, chipmunks are everywhere this year.  And it's not just your imagination.  Apparently there was a very large crop of acorns and other nuts last fall and this enabled a larger portion of the chipmunk population to survive the winter.  So now they've inundated the entire north east.  

In a typical summer I would see a chipmunk once in a while.  They're definitely around in western New York, but they're normally a lot less common (at least in residential areas) than gray squirrels.  But this year I see them multiple times almost every day.  In fact, one even took up residence under our front porch.  Since I have a soft spot for them, and they don't seem to be bothering our plants, we put out an old cat dish and filled it with bird seed.  Needless to say, the chipmunk seems to appreciate this - the sunflower seeds were a particular hit.

They've gotten pretty brazen, too.  The picture above is a chipmunk on my in-laws' back steps.  He had just been sitting up, staring down their golden retriever, as if mocking him for not being able to catch him through the glass.  Probably not a good habit for a chipmunk, but at least it's entertaining.

Though they're a pest to some, I don't mind the chipmunks.  Even if they do cause some problems, of all the plagues that have been unleashed this year, they're by far the cutest and most endearing.