Delete Me

Most computer systems divide data operations into two camps. One is file management where you deal with one package of data, like text document or an image, and the other is working with the data contained in a file. If you have a bunch of files in a directory, and you open up one to look at it and decide it's no longer useful, you might want to delete it. Well, first you need to close it, and now that it is closed, do you remember what the file name was?

Sure, you could delete the contents of the file which would get rid of the data, but the file would still be hanging around. If it was a text file, the length might be reduced to zero and you could use that bit of information to locate the problem child. Other file formats might not go to zero even when all their content is deleted.

In Google's Blogger and Drive, their cloud based file manager, you can rename the file you are currently working on, and you can do it within the editor, so my solution to getting rid of an unwanted file is to rename it to Delete Me. Close the file, and now when you look at the list of files (or blog posts), the offending item will stand out like a sore thumb. Well, it would if your sore thumb was named Delete Me.

Who Rules The World

【且试天下 Who Rules The World】Trailer | 终极预告：杨洋赵露思执子之手，品春赏夏，看秋经冬
Tencent Video

A very silly, totally over the top, Chinese historical drama. It's nuts, but every once in a while it is very funny. We've seen a bunch of these and they're pretty great. Lavish sets, lavish costumes, beautiful people, beaucoup de schemeing and royal court intrigue, and of course there is a chaste love story. If you are lucky you might seen the leading couple kiss. The fight scenes, and there are always fight scenes, are sometimes realistic and sometimes very stylized. Here they are stylized, so stylized they look like they were choreographed for by a ballet director. Our leading couple has no problem using their superior abilities / magical talents to vanquish a dozen bad guys at one fell swoop. And like I said, it's sometimes very funny.

I used to try and figure out just what historical period / event was being portrayed, but there is so much history and so many characters, characters with names I cannot remember for more than a few seconds, that I've given up. Sometime between 0 AD and 1000 AD I expect.

On Netflix, 40 episodes, 40 minutes each.

Jack

2015 To 2019 GM Chevrolet Colorado Truck - Bottle Floor Jack Location Behind Seats
Paul79UF

I have been meaning to go over to diabolical daughter's house for, what, a couple of weeks? ever since we had the big dumpster event / pizza party and pick up the wheel chocks for my truck. Yesterday I was pleasantly surprised to notice that the chocks were sitting in the back seat of my truck.

My mission for today was to put the jack and wheel chocks back in their place behind the seat. Unfortunately I couldn't figure out how they all fit together. YouTube to the rescue. It's kind of weird because the base of the jack has four little holes, two of which are designed to sit over little tabs in the storage space. However, if you are not careful with stowing the chocks, they will cover the holes and the jack won't fit in its place.

Anyway, thanks to whoever put the chocks and pieces back in my truck.

And for those of you who thought this message was going to be about my friend Jack, I looked up Jack in the owner's manual and it directed me to the page about the stereo input jack.

Barbarossa Brothers

Barbarossa Hayreddin Pasha defeats the Holy League of Charles V under the command of Andrea Doria at the Battle of Preveza (1538) - Osman Nuri Pasha and Hovhannes Umed Behzad (1809–1874)

I always wondered where Hitler came up with the name for Operation Barbarossa. Today I'm reading about the Ottoman Empire in the The Verge and he mentions the Barbarossa Brothers. These guys, Oruç and Hayreddin, were corsairs (pirates basically) raising hell in the Mediterranean on behalf of the Sultan. Barbarossa just means "red beard".

Of course, now I'm wondering who Andrea Doria was. I know there was an ocean liner with that name that was involved in some disaster (collision with another ocean liner in 1956, 46 of the 1700 people on board  died). I always figured it was named after a woman, but I was wrong.

Publicity

I usually play 0hh1 three or four times a day. It's fairly mindless, takes about three minutes to play. During the last few days I've getting an announcement at the end of each game asking me to "share" it, as it will help them "grow". Struck me as a little curious because there are no ads on the page, not when you start, not when you are playing, none. So how would sharing it help them grow? If enough people play it, their server / hosting costs might rise above negligible, in which case they might be able to take it to an adverstising agency, like Google, and sign up to have ads on their site.

Or maybe they're just doing for the glory, and if the costs rise, well, that's a worthwhile price to pay for fame.

🟦🟥 I played 3000 games of 0h h1 💪

🟥🟦 It's fun, free and has no ads.

3,000 games at 3 minutes each would be 9,000 minutes which 150 hours spread over, what? five years? No, at least seven years.

Yippee io Ki-yay

Frank Zappa - Montana (A Token Of His Extreme)
GIGS

I'm listening to this song again, a song I haven't listened to in 50 years, and at the end of the song we've got someone singing Yippe io Ki-yay and they are doing a fine job with it (starts around the 5:25 mark) .

Well, we all (all us cool kids anyway) know the Bruce Willis line from Die Hard:

Die Hard (1988) - Yippee-Ki-Yay Scene (3/5) | Movieclips
Movieclips

So where did that some from? Did Bruce get it from Frank? Or from something older, like Bing Cosby in Rhythm on the Range from 1936:

Bing Sings "I'm an Old Cowhand"
nicoley133

It would make sense if he got it from Frank, I mean we're all contemporaries. I supposed Frank could have got it from Bing, he was older than Bruce and I.

Update November 2022 replaced missing Bruce Willis clip.

Update September 2024 replaced missing Frank Zappa clip.

Jason Goodwin - Westminster Abbey

Westminster Abbey

E-mail advertising "A guided pilgrimage along the Royal Route, through some of London's sacred places, churches, gardens, temples, hills, standing stones and holy wells" showed up in my inbox yesterday. Another one shows up this morning. Okay, what is this? I'm not going to London, and something like this is bound to be pricey, so no, I'm not interested. But then I notice it's from Jason Goodwin, and I remember now that he wrote a couple of books I really enjoyed. I enjoyed them so much I signed up on his mailing list to keep up with what he was doing. That was years ago, but I heard nothing till now.

I suspected the above picture was of Westminster Abbey, but it wasn't labeled, so I did a little checking. As you might expect, the internet is full of pictures of this place, but they were all different. Like almost none of them had the same window at the end. Here's one:

Interior of Westminster Abbey in London UK, F.G.O. Stuart, 1878 - 1890

Here's another:

Interior view of Westminster Abbey from the 13th-century triforium. Set more than 52 feet above the abbey floor, it houses the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Galleries. (Frank Augstein/Associated Press)