Contractors in government

Something that has bothered me for a long time is the contractor situation in the government. I could probably lay out what I mean by that better, maybe later. All I will say for now is that it came back to my mind this morning. I decided to look it up, especially after the research I did earlier this week, that alerted me to the fact that having contractors gives the illusion that the government is smaller and mentioned something about the number of civil servants getting reduced. So this Federal Times article stated that the 1994 Federal Workforce Restructuring Act eliminated 273,000 positions. It mentions that this movement began in the 80s, which makes sense given Reagan's policy.  I've seen Donald Kettl's name more than once. It seems that he's an expert in the federal government. I think I also read that he's retired. 

The online publication from the Volcker Alliance entitled The True Size of Government was also enlightening. 

Brown rice revisited

The third time was indeed the charm. I went with 1 cup of rice and 2 1/4 cups of water. I put those in my microwave rice cooker and cooked for 10 minutes at 100%, then 20 minutes at 50%. I was satisfied with the results. The rice cooker comes with a beaker that isn't quite a cup, I think it's 3/4 cup. But now that I know the 2.25:1 ratio, I can go back to that. 

ThinkOrSwim on Fedora

I've been having the ThinkOrSwim blues. I run ThinkOrSwim on Linux. TD Ameritrade provides the platform for Windows, Mac and Linux, but they only provide support for Windows and Mac. Linux users are on their own.

I had an issue around the beginning of the year where ThinkOrSwim stopped working and I eventually called them asking for help. I knew the answer, but I just wanted to confirm that the problem was on my end. I eventually figured it out, and I thought I documented it, but I guess I didn't, because I was definitely reinventing the wheel this go around.

So here's the deal. I said earlier that it's supported for Linux. I do believe that's what their webpage said originally said, but now it is more specific--Ubuntu Linux. And today, in order for SinkOrSwim to work, you need to have the Zulu OpenJDK 11. Therein lies the rub.

One--I am not running Ubuntu, I am running Fedora. I don't know what packages Ubuntu is currently on, but the whole reason for running Fedora in the first place is because of the bleeding edge packages, so it's a safe bet their ahead of Ubuntu. They've been on Java 17 for some time. I'm pretty sure that was the problem before. Fedora moved to Zulu 17 and I had to downgrade back to 11.

So I ran a dnf list installed, which was a lot, so I piped it to a file and looked at it in kate, and I saw that I still had Zulu 11, so initially I was stumped. I've learned that the best thing is usually to come back to it later or the next day, since nowadays I don't usually have a lot of time to troubleshoot before I'm off to the next thing. So today I went through the whole list and saw java-17-openjdk-headless.x86_64. That was the culprit. I installed java-11-openjdk-headless.x86_64, but that didn't work. I had to remove the Java 17 version first, and then install the Java 11 version, so that the dependencies would be correct. Now everything works. 

And then I move to Schwab in less than a month. Hopefully everything is still good.

Wear OS and Oppo Watch

I caught myself going down the rabbit hole and found it was time for a post. Around this time last year I bought an Android watch. I bought it purely for the pedometer functions. I've been wearing a Timex Ironman since I enlisted eons ago, so I needed a watch that was water resistant and I could wear 24/7. I found that there were several cheap options out there, and I bought one. It isn't anything special, but I didn't need anything special. I have missed some of the functions I've been used to for so many years though. Like being able to track seconds when I use the stopwatch or timer. And the watch beeping when the timer ends instead of vibrating. 

I've already lost what brought me back to that train of thought today, but I think what happened was I came across the Wear OS. I thought it was new, but apparently it has been around for a decade. Anyway, I figured that if there was a watch that actually had a Google OS, then it might be better than what I have right now, so I went looking for some. I wandered around, sputtering a bit on Google and Amazon, then I found a list on Wikipedia, which led me to the Oppo watch, which looks quite promising. The one that I was looking at was released several years ago, but it still seems pretty nice, so it's probably worth following up on. 

How do we make the world better?

One interaction at a time. At least that's how I'm thinking to approach it now. I figured I wasn't the first person to have this thought. I found this article on Tiny Buddha by Jason Gutierrez that confirms that theory.

Microwaving brown rice redux

So it took me all this time to microwave some brown rice again. I looked at what I did before, and I almost went with a 2:1 ratio instead, but I decided to stick with the plan. The rice still has a little bit too much water, but I think 2:1 wouldn't have been enough, so now I'm thinking the golden ratio is 2.25:1. I guess we'll see next time.