Well, if you've succumbed to the Office 365 rental model and can thus load spreadsheets off of a onedrive view anyway.

I present, May 7th, 2020 Coronavirus Counties in Oregon with population density information attached. https://onedrive.live.com/view.aspx?resid=2A1ED1E3CF60A906!6024&id=documents

Ok, with SARS-COV-2 or COVID-19 or whatever we're calling it today shutting down the world, I may have some time for some other projects.

With Radio Shack Dead and Fry's sucked up into the UFO graveyard in the sky, where does the discerning geek go to find small electronic parts these days? I assume online someplace.....

I rarely write in my journal, but when I do, it's to ask an incredibly geeky question about either computer programming or science fiction. Today, it's science fiction.

While considering questions about the constitutionality of executive officers ordering quarantines, a vague memory comes to mind of a science fiction story I once read. Can anybody tell me author/series/title from this description?

The planet of LostRoses has a very small human population made primarily of tree farmer/miners who mine diamonds from a certain species of tree- the diamonds are in the nut meat of the seeds of the tree. These crystal roses are in high demand across the quadrant. The planet is a total democracy, except for one quirk in the constitution: In time of emergency, the population gathers in the local bar, and elects somebody God- essentially giving them dictatorship powers for the length of the emergency.

It's virtually a death sentence. Out of 6 emergencies, 5 times God was lynched as soon as the emergency was over. But for the duration of the emergency that person has the sole duty to *solve the problem*.

It seems to me I might have read it back in the 1980s in either Asimov or Astounding, or it might have been a book....I do remember the story I read, God was a female paraplegic whose sole joy in life was hang gliding- and negotiations took place when she took the head of the invading army hang gliding, and that at the end of the story, she became the first person to survive being God due to the treaty she had negotiated.

I can't seem to get google sync to log in this morning, nor my gmail account. It's fine on my phone, but not on the computer.

ThinkSpot has failed. It's not a marketplace of ideas and it doesn't support free speech.

The central problem is that you have to pay to post. Jordan Peterson found a way to charge rent on a conservative echo chamber.

Comments are free but posting stories costs $$$. Because it's already a right wing echo chamber and 90% of the users are of that persuasion there are no progressive or liberal stories at all. None. It's just an endless stream of the Jordan Peterson show with guest appearances from Jordan Peterson wannabes with their own books to sell.

There is no meaningful debate or discussion of ideas. It's not even very accepting of non-conservative ideas, with users regularly calling for anything which doesn't follow the established narrative to be deleted or banned.

I'm sure Peterson is happy that he gets to charge these idiots to feel like they are open minded Classical Liberals.

I have a blog elsewhere, I don't need this journal like I used to. I'm not even sure I'm still a subscriber or not.

But Drinkypoo mentioned there was a bug that was preventing him from posting in his journal, and if it is fixed, you will see this.

My invite to Think Spot finally came. TS is Jordan Peterson's new "free thought" platform.

Predictably it's pretty bad. Most of the posts are what you would expect - hardcore capitalism, thinly veiled dog whistles, anti-feminism and a lot of of ads for Jordan Peterson's products or things that make him money.

The basic premise is that people can have open, unrestricted conversations. The site tries hard to make sure that doesn't happen though, e.g. by hiding replies to comments by default. In fact it truncates comments longer than a few sentences so you have to click to expand them too. There is no voting or moderation system so everything is presented in chronological order.

The ban-hammer has already been in use too. Someone registered the username "JordanPeterson" and is now banned and renamed to "TOSViolation1". Someone called "amusedtodeath" has already called for me to be banned for "trolling" when I presented an opinion contrary to their preferred narrative.

It's still in beta so maybe it will improve, but right now Think Spot is pretty terrible.

Opus is a free audio codec (RFC, BSD licenced library) for compressing speech. I've been experimenting with compressing audobooks so I can fit more on my phone. I should have splurged on the 128GB model.

For high quality audiobooks, i.e. downloaded from Google Play / Audible or ripped from CD, the results with Opus are excellent. Google uses M4A encoding at 32kHz but I found that by re-sampling to 16kHz and re-encoding with Opus at just 24kbits/sec VBR with the default settings I ended up with a file about 1/3rd the size and very nearly as good audio quality. The improvement over MP3 is even greater, down to around 1/5th the original size.

I have some older books that were ripped from tape and they needed some additional pre-processing to compress well. Noise reduction helps and you can do a fair bit with Audacity's filtering tools since voice tends not to be very dynamic compared to music.

I use fre:ac for encoding as it can go direct from m4a and do the down-sampling in one pass. You need the alpha version to get Opus codec support.

All this could have been avoided if the Pixel 4 hadn't sucked but maybe if I see a cheap Pixel 3 I can upgrade to 128 GB.

I hate HR

High functioning autism is kind of like being a human being, but being asked to take a Turing Test every single day and always failing to be human enough to pass.

A priest in Pakistan is trying to use crowdfunding to build an orphanage by Christmas.

For some reason I don't understand, Facebook has already labeled this adventure as being "Against Community Standards"

Just finished my 30th high school reunion, and realized....I haven't seen anybody in the slashdot journals in like forever.

Now true, the advertising on this site (when viewed without adblock) has become horrible- with that quarter-of-your-screen banner advert at the top- but I used to use you guys for tech sounding boards.

I don't remember the last time I did that.

The first two episodes of season 2 of The Orville have sucked. Both boring domestic sitcom episodes.

The first season had some decent if very well worn sci-fi ideas. Let's hope it gets better.

Have a look at this comment.

In the first hour it got a flood of moderation, ending up 60% insightful/informative and 40% troll. 24 hours later Mashiki posts a rely, within a minute it's up to +1, and the linked comment gets hit with multiple -1 troll mods.

This is a very clear and unambiguous case of sock puppetry. The probability of multiple people with mod points seeing a new comment in a day old discussion, modding it up and then modding the parent down is tiny. The fact that Mashiki carefully used just one point on his own post (enough to get it above the default threshold of viewability) and the rest attacking the post suggesting he has been mislead is further proof.

Beyond the sock puppet problem, a consistent issue with Mashiki posts, the fact that this post got so many troll mods is an issue too. It's clearly not a troll. Disagreeing with you is not trolling. The mod system is failing to promote an open debate by allowing some views to be censored.

To remember passwords?

There is one on my laptop now, because I have to change my passwords every 90 days and that isn't enough time to build muscle memory for me anymore.

It says:
1. HR[q]
2. HRFC[q]
3. CR[q]

I want to put it out to the most brilliant people I know, thus my slashdot journal circle. Can any of you guess to at least the category what these encryptions refer to? Because if you can, then my sticky note encryption methodology which is a combination of acronyms, personal knowledge, and arrays is not secure.

This is going to seem downright blasphemous to some data scientists, but it is what I'm being asked to do in support of a Power BI Report and some weird behavior on the part of the business.

Basically, I have a list of results from tests, and am being asked to invent a new category of results for estimated number of tests when the total number of tests is less than the recorded estimate.

I already have two recordsets- the list of real results, and the categorized list of the difference between Real and Estimate.

I'm sure I could, with a double while loop and a cursor, simply loop through the recordset and then run a while loop

But there has to be a way to do this with set operations.

Basically, what I need is something like:
Insert Into Results (Result, EndDate-1hour, category, subcategory) Select Result, Enddate-1hour, category, subcategory for records loop NumberofRecords=EstimateDelta

But even with 21 years of experience in SQL, I don't know quite how to do that.