I feel the need … the need for speed

Optimizing MarkTurner.Net

A few days ago I was playing with Pingdom’s Website speed test and shocked to find how long it was taking MT.Net to load for my legions of website visitors. There were several things slowing it down, earning my site a grade of a gentleman’s “C.”

After digging through some of Pingdom’s suggestions and carefully pruning my WordPress plugins and settings, I’ve managed to whittle down the load time from an average of over 3 seconds to just a hair over one second.

While there’s probably a little bit more performance I could squeeze out this is far better than it was. Enjoy!

Reading about Ulysses S. Grant

I’m spending less time at the keyboard lately and more with good old-fashioned low-tech entertainment: a book! I checked out Grant, Ron Chernow’s biography of Ulysses S. Grant, back in November and have been working my way through this 1,000+ page tome. Yes, it’s way overdue back to the library but I can’t put it down and – good Lord – who can finish a thousand-page book within the skimpy time frame that Wake County Public Library provides its borrowers?

I’ll have more to say about the book and Grant when I finish it but so far I like how Grant faced failure after failure in life until the war broke out and he found his place.

So, if you wonder why I’m not busier here at the moment, you know I have my nose in a book!

Forty-nine trips around the sun

Birthday volunteering at the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina

Yesterday was my 49th birthday. I spent it being celebrated by my family, catching up on well wishes from Facebook, eating a birthday brunch with Kelly at 18 Seaboard, and going on a fun bike ride with Kelly and Travis down to Lassiter Mill dam and back. A sunny, spring-like day warmed to 65 degrees and rapidly melted away the last piles of snow from last week’s snowfall.

As part of my birthday weekend, the whole family and I volunteered for four hours at the nearby Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina, where we sorted potatoes along with about 30 other volunteers. It felt good to help out, and Kelly and the kids enjoyed it, too.

Life at 49 is pretty good, I have to say. While my body is starting to show some signs here and there of being ancient, overall I’m in excellent health. I’m loving my family, enjoy my job, and have countless friends near and far whom I’m honored to call friends. While my life isn’t perfect I am learning how to enjoy the things I have and to help others as well.

January snowfall

A drone’s eye view of the snow.

Last Wednesday morning we got a rather significant snowfall here in Raleigh that kept us out of work and school for the rest of the week. For a while there, it looked as if the heaviest snow would be directly over Raleigh but the fictitious “Raleigh weather dome” (said by equally-fictitious blogger William Needham Findley IV to be controlled by former Raleigh city council member Bonner Gaylord) kept the heaviest snow to the west of us. When it stopped snowing at our home in East Raleigh I had measured 4.75″.

I worked from home Wednesday through Friday (ah, the joy of being a knowledge worker) but did enjoy how beautiful the snow looked on the trees. It was a clumping sort of snow that wound up sticking very well to branches but causing few issues with broken limbs. I also caught up on some technical projects I’d been meaning to get done. It was a nice winter event, though when the streets had cleared I was quite ready to go for a bike ride!

Arrest made after woman stabbed 6 times at Raleigh Food Lion | WNCN

Only 20 years old, Mr. Dixon has been arrested 19 times over the last four years. With his attitude, I am not sure how managed to get all that time outside of jail.

Friends and neighbors have set up a GoFundMe for the victim.

A Raleigh man was arrested Wednesday, less than a week after a woman was stabbed six times outside a Food Lion in Raleigh, police said.

Khawan Dixon, 20, of Milbank Street in Raleigh, is charged in connection with the attack that happened around 6:30 p.m. Jan. 11 in the parking lot of a Food Lion in the 1100 block of N. Raleigh Boulevard, police said.

Police said the woman was near her car when a male suspect came up to her and tried to rob her.

He then stabbed her three times in the head and three times in the back, police said.The suspect left the scene and was able to get away with nearly $1,000 worth of property, according to a Raleigh Police Department report.

Source: Arrest made after woman stabbed 6 times at Raleigh Food Lion | WNCN

Amazon won’t say if it hands your Echo data to the government | ZDNet

Amazon has a transparency problem.Three years ago, the retail giant became the last major tech company to reveal how many subpoenas, search warrants, and court orders it received for customer data in a half-year period. While every other tech giant had regularly published its government request figures for years, spurred on by accusations of participation in government surveillance, Amazon had been largely forgotten.

Eventually, people noticed and Amazon acquiesced. Since then, Amazon’s business has expanded. By its quarterly revenue, it’s no longer a retail company — it’s a cloud giant and a device maker. The company’s flagship Echo, an “always listening” speaker, collects vast amounts of customer data that’s openly up for grabs by the government.

But Amazon’s bi-annual transparency figures don’t want you to know that.

Source: Amazon won’t say if it hands your Echo data to the government | ZDNet

Spoken stats from my weather station

Last Christmas (2016), I got an AcuRite weather station from Costco as a gift to replace my falling-apart Oregon Scientific station. It’s a decent little setup, with wireless transmission from a multi-sensor box outside to the panel inside. For the longest time my biggest complaint was its need to use Windows software to archive its data.

Acurite weather station

Then early last year I hooked up the open source weather software weewx to my station. Weewx creates a nice (if simple) graph of weather data (as seen at https://www.markturner.net/wx) and also kicks the data over to my MySQL database so I can save and query those stats. Last month I was able to create a fancy Grafana dashboard that dynamically displays that data in a beautiful format. Now I had taken a $75 weather station and made it much more useful!
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The leadership itch returns

Last Thursday, I attended an RPD Community Meeting at Lions Park Community Center. It was a meeting to answer neighborhood concerns about the recent incident of delayed police response as well as answer any questions about crime in the area. A handful of neighbors attended, the usuals I’ve become used to seeing at CAC meetings, and a bevy of police officers, detectives, and representatives from the Communications Center.

I have two pages of notes on that meeting that I would like to type up into a report, but the point of this post is how at home I found myself feeling in that room. After three years of conducting CAC meetings, I was all too happy to volunteer questions when the presenters asked for them. I didn’t organize the meeting nor was I in charge of it but I certainly felt right at home quizzing these people for things I wanted to know.

In short, I may indeed miss being a CAC chair. More than that, I miss that I wasn’t able to run for City Council. I have not forgotten how absolutely jazzed I used to feel after my CAC meetings. The small taste I got of it Thursday reminded me that this is where I’m in my element. I hope some day I can get there.

The Space Review: A NEMESIS in the sky: PAN, MENTOR 4, and close encounters of the SIGINT kind

PAN/NEMESIS satellite

Here’s an interesting story from 2016 about spy satellites. Amateur satellite spotters determined that the “PAN” satellite of the U.S. Government were tiptoeing up next to geostationary commercial communications satellites so they could vacuum up the signals being relayed through them. Speculation is that PAN was able to triangulate the position of satellite phones used by terrorists, enabling drone strikes.

This would make a fun new hobby.

After launch, the enigma became even bigger. PAN was placed in a geostationary orbit and observations by amateur satellite trackers (including this author) from Europe and South Africa revealed very unusual behavior. Every few months—usually once every six months—PAN moved to a new position. In a mere four years time, it moved at least nine times to various longitudes scattering between 33 and 52.5 degrees east (see my blog post “Imaging Geostationary satellites, and PAN’s past relocations”). This costs fuel, and it is something you normally do not do with a geostationary satellite, as liberally spending fuel drastically shortens the satellite’s operational lifetime. In late 2013, the relocations suddenly stopped and PAN has remained at longitude 47.7 degrees east. This active stationkeeping at this longitude means it must still be operational, although the satellite obviously has ended its previous roving state. All very mysterious! What was this spacecraft doing?

Source: The Space Review: A NEMESIS in the sky: PAN, MENTOR 4, and close encounters of the SIGINT kind

Tom Dundon, king of subprime auto loans

Tom Dundon

The local paper is singing the praises of the new owner of the Carolina Hurricanes, Tom Dundon. WRAL Sports Fan The News and Observer’s Luke DeCock and Chip Alexander lauded the “self-made billionaire” in an adoring story today:

Dundon, 46, has no background in professional sports but knows how to operate a successful business and already has analyzed much of the Hurricanes’ organization and operation. He also likes to win.

Let’s talk about this “self-made billionaire” who “knows how to operate a successful business.” Dundon’s successful business was Santander Consumer Holdings USA, the subprime auto lending arm of the Spanish bank, Santander. Dundon founded the business and ran it until July 2015, when he stepped down just as the regulatory heat was being turned up on Santander. Santander Consumer is in the subprime auto loan business, making what some say is 1 out of every 5 loans. For those of you who didn’t see the film The Big Short or slept through the 2008 recession, America’s economy was nearly ruined by the kind of loans lenders like Santander made.
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