The Continental Safe

John Wick

You remember John Wick, right? I mean, how could you forget?

The Continental hotel manager Charon (Lance Reddick) and John Wick (Keanu Reeves) in the armory

The latest chapter has him and Chaon, the hotel manager, visiting The Continental hotel's armory to pick up a couple of guns. Of course the hotel has an armory. Don't all hotels have armories?

The $100,000 Continental Safe From John Wick

Now you can have your own armory, styled after the Continental's, complete with a bunch of guns.


Guns & Knives included with The Continental Safe
Via say uncle

Dark Knight

William Golding

Erick S. Gray

These two guys are writers, except William Golding passed away, so he's not writing any more. Erick is still alive and still writing, as far as I know.

There is a meme out on the internet that combines quotes from these two guys, but it generally gets attributed to (or blamed on, depending on your point of view) William. Erick is ignored (or escapes blame, as before).

The combined quotes:

I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been. Whatever you give a woman, she will make greater. If you give her sperm, she’ll give you a baby. If you give her a house, she’ll give you a home. If you give her groceries, she’ll give you a meal. If you give her a smile, she’ll give you her heart. She multiplies and enlarges what is given to her. So, if you give her crap, be ready to receive a ton of shit!

The first two sentences in the quote are from William, the rest is from Erick.

William is kind of famous, he wrote Lord of the Flies, won a Nobel Prize and was knighted. Erick has written several books and has achieved a modicum of success.

I don't know if women are superior to men, it's like comparing apples and oranges. Men and women can be great or terrible depending on their situation and disposition. For the combined quote to be valid, you need a good situation and tolerable dispositions. I still like it.

This post makes two knights in two days.

Quote of the Day

Prince Charles knights Roger Scruton in 2016

You can lose your faith without losing the values that derive from it or the spiritual orientation that it implanted in your soul. And you might retain those things and be all the more distressed by a secular culture that mocks or tramples on them. - Roger Scruton

I never had much faith, but I think I have a pretty strong set of values, and they are pretty much Christian ones. So this quote hits close to home.

I came across this in the first section of a long essay by Sir Roger. He starts off by talking about Jesus, the Roman Empire, the Ottomans and Mohammed and the balance / conflict between a religious authority and a secular one. That will give me enough to chew on for a while. He goes on for a bit, I didn't read the whole thing. I can only absorb so much at one sitting. It will take me a while to digest what I read.

Sir Scruton passed away recently. Several people made note of it, I had never heard of him before.

Stacking

Setting the dryer on top of the washer. Vertical clearance was a little tight.

The new clothes dryer showed up at John's house this week a month after he ordered it. The first one got mashed enroute, so it went back and we had to wait for a replacement to show up. The house is small, so the dryer is going to be stacked on top of the washer. Should be easy to do, right? While clothes dryers are big and bulky, they don't weigh much because they are mostly empty space.

The washer and dryer were supposed to show up with a stacking kit that would include whatever bits are needed to secure the dryer to the top of the washer. You don't want it walking around up there. The kit didn't show, so off to Lowes we go to pick up a kit. They have three different ones, all in brown cardboard boxes and all costing about $60 each. We do some checking and pick one and off we go.

Holes in bracket do not align

The kit is absurd. It contains two angle brackets, 8 screws and 4 little rubber feet. Couldn't have been more than $2 worth of parts. That would have been okay if everything had worked as it should, but nothing did. The stick-on rubber feet didn't stick even after we cleaned the oil off of the foot pads. We ended up securing them with masking tape. The brackets were just as bad. Either we got the wrong kit or bracket people didn't talk to the washer people. We had to drill new holes in the washer for the screws.

Once the stacked washer and dryer are all connected to the outlets in the wall, they need to slide into their hole in the wall. The dryer doesn't weigh much but the two of them together are kind of hefty and they don't want to slide. We cut a piece of cardboard to go under the washer's feet. That allowed us to to slide it into position. Don't know how we will get that cardboard out.

So all the new appliances and installed and working. The kitchen cabinets still need some shelves and doors installed. It's taken us nearly a year and a half and bucket of money to get this far, but the end of phase one is in sight.

Palindrome day

Sator Square

Dennis writes:

02 02 2020
33rd day of the year
333 days left in the year

Pick a palindromic time of day, and take a moment to reflect.

I'm doing 11 seconds of silence from 11:11 am to 11:11:11 am

Other sects have their own commemorative practices.
Some recommend avoiding mirrors.

Speaking of palindromes:
Christian Lawson-Perfect claimes he can write any positive number as a sum of three palindromes.

Popcorn Sutton

Moonshine Making 101
I don't know about the rest of this video, but the intro is great. I looked around and tried to find a more complete clip, but I didn't have much luck. This one at least has a decent tune to go with it. The old guy is likely Popcorn Sutton, a famous old moonshiner.

Reminds me of Tommy Lee Jones dancing a jig in The Homesman.

PDF Images

HiRISE camera drawing

The HiRISE camera is one of the instruments on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. I'm looking for pictures of it, not pictures taken by the camera, but pictures of the camera, and I'm not finding much. I finally locate a PDF file with some images, but how do I get the images out of the PDF? I'm running Linux on my PC, so no Adobe Acrobat here, though I wouldn't want to use it even if I could. Adobe is part of the mainstream PC business that seems to revolve around adding more cute tricks so they can sell upgrades. Those cute tricks might be useful to some people, but they add more complexity and reduce reliability, not to mention requiring frequent, time consuming updates. No tanks. [end rant].

I have Okular, a fancy PDF file viewer that works on Linux, and I can use the selection tool to copy images and save them to a file. I used it to extract some of the images from the PDF file of NSA security posters. It works, but it is time consuming and tedious. Besides, in any PDF file that isn't just a photo copy of a paper document, the images ought to be objects within the file. Any good PDF editor should be able to extract them. Acrobat might be able to do that but I'll never know.

This morning I looked around and found PDFaid. I tried it on my target PDF file and it worked, sort of. It extracted some of the images, but the one I really wanted came out as a bunch of 10 pixel high strips. I supposed you could stitch them together if you were patient, but that's not me. I used Okular for that one.