Day 1179 – Caitlin Clark and Joe Biden

Monday, July 22, 2024

I’ve got a lot better thing to do than be writing this, but … but … oh well.

Since my last writing at least two major major things have happened. Joe dropped out and Caitlin Clark and the WNBA All Stars who weren’t selected for the Olympic team beat “the best team in the world.”

Aside from that my headlines had “The Ten Worst Quotes in Wrestling History.” I guess this is surfacing because Terry Boilea ripped his tee shirt open to reveal he’s a closet Trump supporter. (Yes. Terry Bolilea is Hulk Hogan’s real name.) And, the other massive headline was something about the five most propitious horoscope signs. Big news to be sure. 

Now the headlines are about what a great guy Joe Biden is and how excited the Dems are now that Kamala is heir apparent. “The Prosecutor versus The Felon” blah blah blah.

I don’t know. Seems risky to me. But then I think a can of soup should be able to beat Donald. Hey, I’m selling Charlie Manson ear bandages just like the one Donald is sporting.

Meanwhile, a big chunk of the world stopped working because of a “fix” Crowdstrike sent out. Now a few more people have heard of them. Apparently, it was a C++ coding error. They forgot to check for a null byte. A null byte is an 8 bit integer where all the bits are set to 0. It’s a zero. typically, nulls are used in C and C++ to terminate a string of characters. If you have let’s say the words “Hi Mom” it would be stored as the six characters plus a zero byte at the end (a “space” is a character too). A zero byte is null. To find the end of the string you set a pointer  to the beginning of the string and “walk” down the string by incrementing the pointer by one until you reach a 0 or as they say “null byte.” This is pretty basic stuff, but it doesn’t mean someone can’t get twisted up in their code and forget to do it or accidentally “walk off the end of a string” and wander around in memory. Fortunately, there are a lot of null bytes in most executable code so you’ll usually hit one pretty quick. In fact, most compression programs just squeeze null bytes out of code. But the fact that there are so many and logic tests can be tricky it’s easy to miss a null byte test. Yes, it’s basic stuff, but it happens, and they can be hard to find. That’s why so much code that works is never rewritten even if it’s an ancient language. That’s why our fighter planes run on 286 chips, etc.

It’s amazing to me when I fly a big kite or I create some code that it does what I expected it to do. Well, I’ve been lucky with big kites, not so much with code. In fact, never with code the first time.

So Joe’s a great guy, wish him well, yeah Kamala. Is she up to the job? Well, we know Donald is not. He has a proven track record of do nothingness. And his speeches are rambling mind word salads. For reasons I can’t explain his supporters don’t seem to mind. He’s within three years of Biden’s age. He did nothing to improve our county when he was President and much to make it worse, and he’s promising to do real damage this next time around. 

He surrounded himself with crooks and cheats, but this time they are more organized. He’s pledging the same things the Republican Party has pledged since our middle class started sliding into poverty. Cut taxes – not for you, well maybe a little – but on the Uber rich, who support him. Destroy our alliances, piss off our allies, and carry out the most inhumane deportation program he can get away with.

Let’s hope.

Okay, the best team in the world got spanked. This raises again the specter of should they have left Caitlin Clark off Team USA? I don’t know. It seems pretty dumb to me, but I’ll tell you who they are probably regretting not asking back and that’s Arike Ogunbowale.

That woman came alive in the third quarter and lit up Team USA with huge arching three pointers. She beat Team USA. And Angel Reese was nice in her attitude and comments. I guess she’s showing her middle class Randallastown, Maryland back ground and not her “Bal-te-mo’” hood stuff people have been trying to put on her. I lived in Randallstown I should know. In fact, I was going into Baltimore from Randallstown on Liberty Road three days after Watergate when I heard the news about the break-in. I was turning by the Mondawmin Mall and I said to myself, “I don’t care what they say Nixon was involved.” That’s the day I became a Democrat and not a “it’s none of my business, who cares? “apathetic college student.