If you’re planning on using CentOS 7 with mdadm RAID, please do avoid.

I never did identify the specific problem but it’s as buggy as a 10-day-old corpse.

Had ridiculous and unsolvable problems with this config creating a simple RAID 5 set with four drives. Should be very easy. Instead I’ve wasted loads of time on it.

Same drives, same config, same hardware — only difference was Ubuntu vs. CentOS.

Worked fine, no issues. Not one of the problems I had with CentOS and their version of mdadm.

CentOS and RAID — just don’t do it. (And avoid systemd in the process.)

I think one of the reasons I was successful in my weight loss is the mental model I had and have of it.

Most FA types seem to see a diet as a punishment. But one of the problems is that they are on a “diet.”

I never went on a diet and never saw it that way. I knew that path was doomed to failure.

Instead I changed my lifestyle, my habits and gave myself something to look forward to.

Instead of the utterly asinine, “Oh no, I can’t stuff my face with 2,000 worthless calories today, I’m being oppressed!” It become, “Oh, cool, I get to make higher-quality, better-tasting food every day that while smaller is more filling and more nutritious — and I can also eat that $7 mascarpone dessert I really want on Saturday that I’d never normally buy as it’s so expensive, rather than gorging on cheap garbage.”

I have never went on nor have I ever been on a diet. Still lost 60 pounds.

I’ve kept it off for five years so I must be doing something right.

That’s right, it’s been five years now — 25% of my body weight gone for good.

They said it couldn’t be done.

I said, you ain’t met me. 😉

I’ve got no patience for anyone who makes fun of trailer park residents or trailer parks in general.

Trailer parks are affordable housing — probably the only remaining affordable housing in America — though they are disappearing.

I started my life in a trailer park. Where else was my family going to live? It’s all that they could afford. Would you preferred that I had been homeless from age 0-5? Would that have suited you better?

Don’t answer that if you are the typical one-percenter. We already know what you’ll say.

Trailer parks vary in character and cleanliness as much as any other housing type does.

I’m always bothered by how so many in America are willing to write off those doing just a little bit worse than they are.

But it’s how the masters keep control, by forcing the rabble to fight it out for the scraps.

Trust me, I’ve dwelt among those overlords. In some ways I am one of them now. And by the way, they don’t at all distinguish the trailer park resident from the middle-class homeowner.

You’re all parasitic trash and as soon as they can send your job to India or China, they very much will.

Remember that when you belittle trailer park residents.

So much that is surprising to scientists is surprising only to scientists.

Especially when they do anything related to or abutting the humanities.

I have another post in store about phenomena related to these ideas, but let’s talk about when the Gnome3/Windows 8/SystemD braindead contingent claim that, “Well, people hated Windows 95 when it came out, too!”

Or Windows XP. To bolster the fuckwit idea that “people just hate change” for making products so terrible that people won’t even despoil their compost pile with them.

Both claims are false. I remember very well when Windows 95 came out. Windows XP, too. Windows XP was released into a big recession and had other headwinds, but it was indeed greeted warmly and was widely welcomed as a big improvement.

However when Windows 95 came out it was such an upgrade that people went absolutely apeshit about it. No joke. People not only didn’t hate change, they were clamoring for it. Here’s what it looked like just about everywhere.

People lined up at midnight. Stores were jam-packed the night of its launch and for weeks afterward. I witnessed this myself, in person, with my own eyes.

So no, dumbasses, there was no significant backlash against Windows 95 or Windows XP.

People don’t hate change. They just hate bad tools, bad design, and your specific mega-failures that you like to call a “user interface.”

Yeah, I am talking to you, Gnome 3 developers — and Windows 8 developers.

My family was poor, especially when I was 0-7. Poor enough that I thought getting a piece of white bread was a treat.

So it’s weird and humbling to think that this year our household will be in the top 5% of US earners.

How did that even happen?

I think inflation-adjusted I’ll make this year alone more than my dad probably did total from 18-40.

Dang.

It’s so much better than what I thought my future would be: dead or in prison by 25.

Go me.

“Thin privilege” is one of the biggest piles of bullshit this side of a cattle ranch. But this says it best. Yeah, yeah, there are more imortant things to do than fighting against the FA/Celebration morons, but they are so much fun to bait and they are a complete embodiment *cough* of the ridiculous and self-imposed ills of our entire modern society.

No human being is worth paying more than a million dollars a year.

Not a single one.

And the ones who possibly might be — like Steve Jobs and a very few others — would do what they do anyway without billions of dollars being thrown at them.

If anyone makes more than a million dollars a year (or equivalent), your society is probably sick.

Movie references are fun.

The “HAL” in “HAL 9000” is also only one letter off from IBM. This is more evidence of a direct reference to IBM.

One day I want to write a piece about references in film that are nearly everywhere but harder to quantify — such as how so, so very many movies reference the Mercury astronaut’s walking down the corridor iconic scene from The Right Stuff.

I notice them all the time and point them out, but they are harder to catalog because visual things always are.

How to Identify and Avoid the Most Common Telephone Scams.

People still answer the phone? Who does that?

I might not like text messaging much as it’s so slow and inefficient, but I hate the phone even more.

I seem to be on a rampage against the fat acceptance/fat celebration movement lately. But they make it easy as they are now so unscientific and disconnected from the evidence as to be complete parodies of good sense.

So here I go again.

Like this. Doctors know that if you weigh 350 pounds, many of your other health problems are likely caused or exacerbated by that. They’ve been to medical school. Trust me, they know and their knowledge is accurate and evidence-supported.

And also, the word “curvy.” (Warning: If you click on the links from here on, you will see naked people.) When I was a kid and even a young man, curvy meant this woman.

She is curvy. She has very feminine lines. She’s thin but not skinny — this was the very definition of curvy until I was 20 or so.

But then curvy — at least by the FA nutcases — became this.

That is not curvy. That is obese.

Yeah, yeah, meanings of words change, blah blah, but the meaning here is being redefined by people who can’t help but stuffing their gobs with Twizzlers and Twinkies and thinking the world owes them being attracted to them.

Well. That ain’t pretty when men do it, and it ain’t pretty when women do it either (which the FA movement is mostly female).

I ain’t owe you shit. I decide who I am attracted to. Not being attracted to obese women is not some sort of -ism. I’m also not attracted to jerks, Nazis or conservative women, or women with gauges or tattoos. My right. Not yours.

I believe fat people should have all the rights (and the responsibilities) of everyone else. No exceptions.

But I also believe that jesus christ just shut the fuck up and work more on losing weight rather than making the rest of us suffer through your misdirected bullshit.

Fuck.

When people claim that an AI apocalypse or similar are ridiculous or impossible, be sure to remember how absolutely fanatically insane you would’ve seemed and been accused of being if in 1800 you’d claimed that in less than 200 years there’d be a single bomb no bigger than a wagon that could destroy an entire large city — region, even.

Yet we have those now.

What little imagination most people have goes to attempting to reduce it in others.

Of all the ways Gnome Shell sucks, the fact that it uses a compositor that you can’t turn off is probably the most blatant.

Because it means that when you connect with any remote control tool — like VNC — it makes your CPU usage go through the fucking roof.

Anyone who had anything at all to do with Gnome Shell, systemd, or Windows 8 should never be permitted to write, design or even to use software again.

When I could’ve done better, you have failed. Really really failed like no one has ever failed before.

The only people who like Gnome Shell are people who are very, very dumb.

By contrast, here is what happens when you remote in to a sane environment not written by oxygen-starved microcephalic morons:

Before the main body of my post, let me state that for the record that I do think there can be an evolutionary psychology.

Humans evolved and human brains are also evolved organs. Why would we think because brains got a bit larger that we were somehow immunized from evolutionary pressures and limitations? Not too damn likely. Thinking anything else is kinda idiotic.

That said, most evopsych is claptrap. Just poor, poor science. Misogynistic, retrogressive, deleterious to humanity.

But it does speak to the extreme nutritional pressures humans have experienced in the past that now people would rather spend time convincing themselves that being fat is attractive and desirable rather than attempting to improve themselves where that’d actually be true.

That is to say, food trumps sex/reproduction for humans in the right economic conditions. Interesting in its own way. But pretending humans haven’t evolved is as offensively funny as the image above. And pretending that being the size of the average tractor-trailer is a natural human desirable state is just lunatic.

This post is a trainwreck but I worked too much this weekend and I ain’t care.