Steak, Quantum Cake, and Pumpin' the Brakes

...But First, Don't Forget Mistakes!

Before we get into March proper, let the record show that our lovely neighbors "the Jamaicans" had six cars parked here on the last day of February (after we'd already sent out the newsletter).

As a friendly reminder, the terms of our leases specify a maximum of two cars. (But then, these are the same troglodytes who had eight parked here overnight during our last blizzard, such that others of us in the building weren't even able to park in our own parking lot.)

So, here we are. Let's count 'em:

1. the huge white human-trafficking cargo van, front-left
2. the silver Toyota immediately to the right of the van
3. the gold BMW that's backed in another four spaces up
4. the blue SUV at bottom-right
5. the blue sedan five spaces up, between Ruth's white SUV and the black pick-up
6. and finally, the blue-gray SUV way up past the black pick-up, by the tree

Meanwhile in greater Morrisville—to the extent that such a name even makes sense—we got a reminder of why Riley doesn't attend Morris-vile High School.

On 02 March, Athennia happened to see a story in her news feed about a fight two-on-one beatdown that had occurred between three girls at the school the Wednesday before. (6ABC even had a video of it—in which they'd helpfully highlighted all the most egregious parts... albeit by bleeping and blurring them out.)

But when Athennia showed Riley and asked if she'd heard about it from Kassie or anyone else still enrolled at that zoo, Riley was like,

So, here ya go—raw and uncut, compliments of the Molerat! YouTube slapped an age restriction on this one, due to it having more violence and profanity than any three Quentin Tarantino films put together; so, you'll have to be logged in to watch it... but, good God, what animals!

Now Then, Someone Said Steak?

Sadly, the massive snow accumulations from last month have all but disappeared amidst our recent heat wave.

In fact, the only snow left around the apartment complex is the pile in front of the space where we'd been parked for the last blizzard...

...and that's because I'm just about the only one here (except for maybe our neighbor Jeff) who has retained enough of a conscience to...

1. shovel out the entire parking space, instead of just driving away and leaving the mess for someone else; and
2. move the snow into the grass as I do so, instead of chucking it out into the middle of the parking lot.

On Monday evening, Athennia flirted with the idea of making steak for dinner; but then she made sausage, peppers, and rotini instead...

But, she made steak two evenings later—with broccoli, mashed potatoes, and caramelized onions on top of a Parmesan crust...

...and that was quite a meal, as you can see.

But, unfortunately, that was about it for the "noteworthy blog stuff" until we got to the weekend.

A Quantum Birthday

Mom's a septwoagenarian this year (which means she turned 72).

So, on Saturday the 7^th, we went to my parents' house for roast beef with Kelly's family and Uncle Roy and Aunt Sue.

Hannah was in charge of Fun and Mayhem^TM, and she really nailed it...

And then, after everybody ate all their veggies, we had cake!

Hannah requested that her sliver of cake remain upright on the plate—which meant it was time for a quick science lesson...

Ah, yes... Nothing livens up a party quite like quantum mechanics!

Then there was more Fun and Mayhem...

Pumpin' the Brakes

In other "news," I realized back in early February that my primary storage drive on my PC was down to a measly 55GB of free space (on a 2TB solid-state drive)... which is a pretty critical issue that I'd been putting off addressing for too long.

After doing some digging to find the culprits who were taking up so much space, I discovered that it was mostly all the long-form videos I regularly rip from YouTube about things like homesteading, and woodworking, and other stuff I'm interested in.

So, last month I embarked on a quest to feed my entire video library into ffmpeg (basically the Swiss army knife of media processing) and have it shrink the quality down at imperceptible levels where my videos would still be perfectly watchable but their file sizes would shrink significantly.

This process takes a lot of time and CPU power—and generates insane amounts of heat, which meant that my computer kept overheating and shutting itself off!

So...

Midway through last month, I coded a quick and dirty shell script to get a better handle on things: ffmpeg doesn't have any kind of "pause" functionality built into it; so, instead, I just had my script keep a few timers going, and I'd periodically tell the operating system to temporarily stop ffmpeg's execution so that the CPU could take a breather and let some of the excess heat dissipate.

Everything that happens on a Linux machine (or any OS, really) exists as a process and gets assigned an ID number that can be used to reference it over the course of its life.

That even includes the lowly sleep command (which just halts a process's execution for a given number of seconds—something my script was doing in various ways). As every instance of sleep that spawns is in fact a process in and of itself, each of those short-lived instances was getting assigned a unique ID number.

So, on Sunday the 8^th, when I noticed how high the process-ID counter had become, I took this screenshot...

I've seen process IDs into the six-figures plenty of times on servers I've managed over the years (that rarely ever turn off and can run for years without even a reboot)... but I don't recall having ever personally seen PIDs in the 600,000s before.

So I thought it was kind of crazy. Soon it'll be as high as the number of cars the Jamaicans have parked in our lot!