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Right Angle: Backstage (07-06-2022)

WARNING: This episode includes graphic images and discussion of Bill Whittle’s recent minor surgery which may not be appropriate for anyone who doesn’t take an unnatural interest in graphic images and discussion of minor surgery.

Right Angle: Backstage (07-06-2022)

If you’re watching this Backstage event for the first time, you’re in for a treat.*

WARNING: This episode includes graphic images and discussion of Bill Whittle’s recent minor surgery which may not be appropriate for anyone who doesn’t take an unnatural interest in graphic images and discussion of minor surgery.

* — Management makes no claim of any causal association between the video appended hereunto and the aforementioned “treat”.

https://youtu.be/KzZx3LC5U-c

38 replies on “Right Angle: Backstage (07-06-2022)”

Bill, I had a kitchen knife fall on my foot that severed the tendon controlling my big toe. Required surgery and about 10 stitches. Anyway, the nurse recommended a scar cream – MedermaPM – to use as soon as the wound closed, and for a month thereafter. I can barely see the scar now. Highly recommend it. And highly recommend wearing shoes in the kitchen.

“National Parks are the Museums of the Outdoors.”–My Mom.
Years of camping with Mom & Dad taught us how to behave in “museums”: Don’t climb on or touch the exhibits. When we finally made it to the National Gallery, we knew just how to behave. (Of course penalties for climbing and touching include death at Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Arches.)
We watched Inception in a packed theater. The collective gasp at the last moment of the last scene is why theaters matter. Don’t get me started with the time the best parents ever let us skip school to wait in line for the local premier of The Empire Strikes Back in 70mm.

Bill, been there, have the scars to show for it. Multiple basal cell removals over the years, shoulder, nose, back. Needed Mohs for a spot on my forehead that wouldn’t go away via creams or freezing, ended up taking a nickel-sized hole. Cut a triangle top and bottom and sew, leaves one with a new wrinkle but what are you going to do? Get the cancer removed, that’s what! Glad you got it done, it’ll heal fine. My dad had loads of basal cell removal but he was a WWII Naval aviator and they didn’t know about sunscreen back then.

A great analogy:
Giant Sequoias need the little trees.
Not just while they grow giant, but even after they have been around 1,800 years.
So giants like Bill Gates et al. may want to reconsider eliminating the 80% to 90% of the world’s population they think is extraneous and using too many of the earth’s resources. It may turn out that without us they will topple as well. It is human hubris that causes some to think they can take drastic actions without drastic unanticipated consequences. Maybe, just maybe, those of us in fly-over country are essential to the growth and the sustainability of grand and noble giants.
And in the case of the Sequoias, it was also man’s hubris not their own decisions which lead to their literal downfall.

It may be, indeed, that a few steelmakers, a few aluminum smelters, a few fabricators etc. will be needed. And it is doubtful that planners can anticipate those needs as well as a market economy does.

Scott’s comment about the movie Elvis, “a little less talk” is ironic since he recorded a song called “A little less talk, a lot more action” (or something like that, I think it was a cover or re-recording of something written for someone else a few years before Elvis did it, and I know others have done it since).
Favorite fireworks show – EAA fly-in (Oshkosh, WI) a few years back my brother and I were up for the Saturday night aerial show and fireworks. They started off with the formation flying 4 planes from WWII, with smoke and other things that could be seen in the failing light of dusk, then had a twin engine bedecked with lights flying a pattern with the lights blinking in time with the music you could kinda hear from speakers. The best part though was a jet engined sail plane that took off, got to its preferred altitude, and then turned off the engine. You could kinda hear it flying up there in the dark but the music was perfectly audible while it shot fire works one some kind of automatic system that launched from the from the left or right side of the plane as it must have been making figure 8’s over the runway area. One would burst on one side, then two on this side. Two would appear on the far side then down the way, followed by another single back on this one.

Well, the local movie houses rake in the money, stuff it in bags, and then put it on the curb like leaves for the studios to pick up and pile up to jump on.

I’m afraid I think the Federal government does have jurisdiction over abortion. The 5th amendment says,”No person… nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;…” where is the due process for the unborn child? Or if that isn’t enough try the 14th ammendment; “…nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws… ” How is abortion equal protection for the unborn? I am a strong federalist, but abortion needs to be gone nation wide, just like slavery, we just do not need a new amendment for this, we just need to follow what we have already.

I am OK with a Constitutional Amendment to define when a person is alive and therefore deserves the equal protection under the law. And this seems a little bit over the top to me, but this is what we have come to in this world these days. (Too many lawyers that think they need to define what the definition of “IS” is, but I digress). Sorry I have to run, but thanks for the comment.

I had a basal cell carcinoma on the bridge of my nose, right under where the pad of my glasses sits. For years, thought it was just a scar/wear from that. Glad it was just was it was. Glad you’re ok, too.

I would love to see those trees. I remember seeing a picture from the early1920’s of a road carved thru a tree with a car and family sitting inside of the hole. Sacrilege. Just as bad as those idiots who toppled a stone pillar just “because”. Why do people think some of nature is just there for them to destroy?
Waiting for your shows. This was great, and I watched it in one sitting. Well I did get up and walk around, but still, one sitting. Bill your scar is just fine. My melanoma took a huge chunk of my right upper arm. After 11 years the muscles are still a bit weak. But I am still working on them. See you tonight on TSL.

I really enjoy BackStage and I always learn something.
Today I learned that American Idol is still on TV and that Katy Perry still has a career. I remember seeing Lionel Richie in concert when I was in HS. Earned a lot of points with my GF at the time. And I got to see his opening act – Tina Turner!!!!

Recently both my wife and her mother has MOHS, my M-I-L on her nose and my wife on her shin. Bill’s looks like it went very well. Glad to here it.
Folks of a certain age like us who remember the phrase “peak tanning hours” and who thought baby oil was a good thing to put on our skin should definitely see a dermatologist on a regular basis.

I still have a crater on the tip of my nose from a rather large biopsy, which was pre cancerous-ish. Doc told me nothing to worry about. Sure, easy for him to say. He didn’t have a crater on the tip of HIS nose. He asked me if I wanted him to “fix it up” and i said no, I have spackle at home in the garage.

Reporter: “What would your reaction be, Senator Kennedy, if the convention drafted you?”
Teddy Bare Kennedy: “I’ll have to drive off that bridge when we get to it.” LOL

Hey! I thorougly enjoyed the backstage show watching it early in the morning with some breakfast and I like seeing your banter for the stuff down the line, but I sure can’t afford 1.5 hr …..maybe that’s not the intent so I might just check in/out for future shows

This is a new world record. Normally, we banter for a tight 60 minutes, or less…or more.

Dwight – welcome if you are new. The Backstage banter is my favorite hour-ish of the week. But even I will admit to having to listen between meetings yesterday. Took almost all day. But since there is no cohesive thread holding the show together, the 10 minute bites were very tasty.
The “no cohesive thread” is a feature, not a bug!

Same thing in the IT field. A doctor sees a lot of patients and so the law of averages says he’ll encounter a broad range of issues. An IT pro sees a lot of computer systems and runs into the same law of averages result.

In both cases the client tends to ignore good advice until doing so bites him in the … Then in both cases the typical reaction is “Why didn’t you help me avoid this?” (Or in my case, “I thought you were supposed to be preventing this kind of thing? Isn’t that what I pay you for?”)

And in both cases all you can do is shake your head because you DID try to tell them they were on dangerous ground and encourage them to take the steps necessary to mitigate any future problems. Which they willfully chose to ignore. Then all you can do is your best effort to pick up the pieces.

30 or so years ago, I brought my Gateway 486dx into a computer service “store”, and told the smarmy guy behind the counter (yeah, with a TI calculator in a holster on his hip) that my system was not booting and maybe I had the Michaelangelo virus. The guy looked at me and said, “did you do a backup?” I said, “well no, I never thought I needed to”. He replied, “Well, how ’bout now?”
Some weeks later, I hired that smarmy dude and he’s been with our company as our lead IT and networking pro for 30 years. Listen to the pros, even IF they’re smarmy.

That story is all too familiar to me. The smarmy IT guys don’t know they’re being smarmy, to them it just seems obvious and if you can’t see the obvious then you must be stupid. That’s not so but that’s the way it seems to them. Typically people with that aptitude have a directly inverse aptitude for social skills.

Being aware of all this, I’ve tried hard to both avoid being smarmy and to not even look like a “computer geek”. Most people are surprised when they find out what I’ve done for a living the last few decades. This has largely, but not always, worked in my favor because people feel more comfortable with me thereby. Mitigating the stereotype can be a business advantage.

I’m sure you’re aware of this but for the benefit of others …

Backups won’t always save you either. There’s no way to know if a backup is good until you need it and have to restore it. If you don’t have the luxury and commensurate budget to have mirrored production equipment to test on you have to fly blind and trust your backups. Because if you test a backup on live production systems you might be taking down a perfectly good running system and restoring a bad backup to it. That’s a disaster any way you look at it.

There’s a saying in this business that goes …
“When all else fails, get out your backups. When your backups fail, get out your resume.”

My dad worked for the National Park Service in Utah, Arizona, and Colorado. He built the roadway for the Bryce Canyon entrance area, and worked on some of the trails in Zion Canyon. I was born just before the family moved to Colorado and we lived just inside the park boundaries. I loved hiking around the hills. We always had deer and foxes around the house. But then dad retired and we moved to another state.
I remember going back to the US a few years ago and was taking some friends from Japan around a national forest and I was surprised at all the dead trees. Before environmentalists put a stop to it, the lumber industry would clear out all the dead wood and they’d try to prevent worms or whatever from killing the trees. A few years later, all that dead wood was fuel for a huge fire that destroyed thousands upon thousands of acres at that same national forest. Land management should be left up to the people that know what they’re doing, and that isn’t the rubber-necking Birkenstock crowd or the suits in Washington.

I think some of the logging industry got a bad rap for the clear cutting some companies did, but that should not stop those that know better from hiring crews to come in and clean out the dead wood and fire fuel.
So much of California’s issues today are from people building houses out in the woods and then not wanting forest fires to threaten their nice little mansions. All of the little fires put out don’t burn up the fuel, as Bill and Steve said with Yellowstone, and then when you have a bigger fire every 3-4 years, it has so much fuel it becomes a really big one. I think I read something a few weeks back that indicated some in Cali were starting to finally understand that concept, about 4 decades later.

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