Chris Petersen

a bar chart of gasoline prices in Hong Kong (HKD per liter) over the last 8 weeks and a line graph for the last 10 years. both show long slow rises over time but nasty, sharp rises in the last 2 weeks. 21% in 2 weeks?????

At moments like this, I tend to run to www.globalpetrolprices.com/gasoline_pri... for a sanity check. Seeing the US at $3.838 and Hong Kong up to $15.042 USD/USG when they're usually around $11 reminds me just how much the Trump regime is inflicting on the rest of the world...

I won't feel like I'm really in trouble until I drop "I am Iron Man" into a conversation... 😇

Who asks (or approves) "can" and "could" questions in headlines like this? Why, yes! And, the moon "could" be made of green cheese. Can / could are rarely useful questions to ask. What will it cost? What are the risks? Lots of other questions are better...

Had one of those mental cross-wiring moments the other day. I was trying to say that "my OCD has me ...". My train of thought derailed, and I started with "my AC/DC has me ..." then "no, my ADHD has me ..." and finally got back to where I meant to be in the first place. #GettingOld

LOL Four e-mails in one day asking if I want to take roles with HP-UX. No, thank you! Never again!

The Waymo of Theseus has a nice ring to it...

It takes a long time to post anything to Bluesky in Old Entish...

And, some authors "never met an adverb [they] didn't like!" Ohhh... I used a different pronoun for that author! That's likely to land me in the dungeons! 😇

If "survive" means nothing more than a return to the status quo ante, then yes. If the US and Israel bungle this as badly as they appear to be bungling it geopolitically, the outcome for Iran could be favorable enough that they won't need one. I'm not betting my lunch money on that though...

I'd blame Remo Williams... 😆

Would a developer with 0x10 fingers automatically be a 10x developer? 🤔

She looks (and sounds) like she just went 10 rounds with Mike Tyson. Yikes! I hope Tennesseans never elect her for anything ever again...

If I were a betting person, I'd be betting all my money that they'll prioritize nobody but themselves and think only of the short term... To do otherwise might get them branded as liberals...

Went back for a re-watch of V for Vendetta. It feels way too on-the-nose on so many levels for the times we're in now. RFK isn't quite breeding superviruses (that we know of), but Trump is definitely angling for that High Chancellor position...

gas prices in southwest illinois, 2026/03/08, $3.38, $3.98, $4.28 in US dollars per US gallon

Thanks, Trump voters, non-voters, and third-party voters! You're getting what you wanted, right?

I definitely remember discussions at Southwestern Bell about a policy of "if it's going into production, buy two" for a while. About the time my contract ended, they were starting a project to get down to *only* five mid-range compute platforms... 😇 #GoodTimes

Ah, the whoosh and whir of air-column tape drives re-positioning... So soothing... 😇

Absolutely! And as others have noted, people with draft-age kids are going to be listening to the drumbeat of war with totally different ears...

Yet.

It's exactly the kind of self-caricature that the Trumpists seem to eat up. How a poor person thinks a rich person acts. How a weak person thinks a strong person acts. How a transactionalist asshat thinks a patriot acts, and so on. It's all performative and mostly for an audience of one... 🤮

Among most of the population, yes. Sadly, I remember a whole bunch of folks after 9/11 who wanted to sign up to "go kill [caricatures and epithets]". I'd bet a draft beer that there will be a surge in enlistments among some cohorts regardless of draft talk...

Well, I'm sure that won't (further) radicalize anyone anywhere... 🤦‍♂️

"The Iranians are targeting #DataCenters because they've become critical infrastructure." Well, that's one take. Or, they're large, multi-billion $ American assets, fixed in place, likely without missile defenses of their own, and Bezos, Nadella, etc. can pressure Trump directly. They get it. 🤔

I'm not big on aggregates and abstracts. Generational change means diddly to me. Getting rid of the pathetic, weak-sauce whiners who won't do their duty, serve their constituents, and fight for what's right and good is where it's at. Old, young, whatever... #JustFightForUs

Oracle stock falls on report of scrapped Texas data center plans Investing.com -- Oracle Corporation (NYSE:ORCL) shares fell 1% in Friday’s final trading hour after Bloomberg reported the company and OpenAI ended plans to expand their Texas data center site.

No matter where you are in the solar system, if you suddenly hear someone howling with laughter amid the on-going horror, it's me right now...

finance.yahoo.com/news/oracle-...

I guess we're finding out what it's like to be the proxy in a proxy war... 😬

Amen! The not-so-offline backups are also the first targets for #ransomware actors who have a clue (if that's not an oxymoron). "Let's sip our #cloud archives back through a straw when we need to restore everything all at once!" is not an option... 👿

Amazon says hours-long outage was triggered by 'software code deployment' Amazon users reported trouble accessing checkout and account information, as well as viewing product detail pages.

Looks like they had an internal oopsy rather than a missile oopsy in this case...

www.cnbc.com/2026/03/05/a...

Israel After the Iran War The false promise of total victory.

If that's really how the average Israeli on the street feels, this is going to be a very long war waged far beyond the boundaries of those pesky rules of engagement. Netanyahu and his coalition partners won't be allowed to do less...

www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/israe...

The surreal experience of meeting Khamenei | Brookings Jeffrey Feltman reflects on his experience as one of the only Americans to meet Iran's now-deceased Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

That's a fascinating read. It's almost like the Ayatollah listened to speeches by Reagan, Bolton, and others and decided that they spoke for America... 🤔

www.brookings.edu/articles/the...