Malcolm X, Alex Haley, Required Reading

I just bought The Autobiography of Malcolm X. One thing that struck me was the line at the bottom--as told to Alex Haley. I generally think of an autobiography as something written by the person themselves, but I understand that this does not have to be the case. I looked at Haley's Wikipedia entry and learned some interesting things:

- He had a career in the Coast Guard

- He wrote for Playboy Magazine

- The aforementioned work was named by Time Magazine as one of the 10 most influential books of the 20th century

That got me interested in the other books. Especially because the Time Magazine article is entitled Required Reading. Wikipedia had a Wayback Machine link, but Time realized the relevance of this article and posted it to their archive. I'll have to add these to my list. 

Interesting recipes

 I came across some pretty interesting recipes--

Croissant Stuffing

Spiced Apple Paloma

Apple Pie Moonshine

Cheddar, Scallion, and Jalapeño Drop Biscuits

Sausage Stuffing

Nice vs. Kind

We got an email at work that encouraged us to be kind. That's a positive admonishment, but it reminded me that in the past I have confused kindness and niceness. I googled and found a post from The Caring Techie Newsletter. The Caring Techie points out that while the terms are used interchangeably, but they don't mean the same thing.  They have different underlying motivations and long-term effects. She has a very nice venn diagram:

Duplicating the Jimmy Dean Eggwich

 Was just thinking about the Jimmy Dean eggwich since I was eating one. I was thinking maybe I could make one and wondering how much effort it was. I checked the internet for copycat recipes. What I found was people using mason jar lids to steam eggs. Or rings. But then someone mentioned english muffin trays. Which made me think about baking. And when you look at the box, it says egg frittatas, which is a type of omelet that is baked. So the thing that's in my head now is a mass production method where instead of using an english muffin pan--which I don't have--I drop a scrambled egg mixture into just a regular pan and bake it, and then cut it into squares. I'm wondering if the sausage can be cooked the same way. I'm sure it can. The trick with the egg would be getting a pan where I get the right dimensions for the number of eggs that I put in. The Jimmy Dean egg mixture includes spinach, carmelized onions and bacon. I don't think I would bother with that last one. 

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.