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Unattended-upgrade in progress during shutdown:
A start job is running for unattended upgrades shutdown

Been having problems with the Linux box. I don't shut it down very often, but recently, the machine has become pretty unresponsive. Generally, when I'm killing a little time by playing a game. The game becomes unresponsive, so I shut down other applications. That doesn't help, the game gets more and more unresponsive, until I decide to do a reboot. Except - the reboot never takes place.

So, I unmask the shutdown dialog, to find the above jewel delaying shutdown, or reboot. Dang, I was beginning to think it was a hardware issue!

So, I search for that message on the internet, and find an exact hit at https://catinsunshine.blogspot.com/2017/02/debian-cant-shutdownreboot-immediately.html

I checked the Debian WIKI for unattended upgrades services and found there are 2 packages involved: unattended-upgrades and apt-listchanges. Check the log file under /var/log/unattended-upgrades/, no record for upgrades, but reboot for test, still stuck on the service for 15 mins. So I make decision to remove it to save my time:

sudo apt remove unattended-upgrades

Then solved. Power-off/Reboot quickly, perfect.

Like the guy said, SOLVED!

So, now, the next question: Where in HELL did this unattended-upgrades come from? I presume it would have come from a dist-upgrade, but I don't know that. I am quite sure that I didn't intentionally install it myself! Obviously, nothing depends on it, so I didn't approve of it while installing some other program.

Is this a systemd thing? Soylentils have discussed abandoning systemd, and I have agreed, but haven't made the move yet. If THIS nonsense is something introduced by systemd, my priorities will change real soon! (need a hard drive to install to, and haven't bought one yet)

Ideas?

Also - it has been quite some time since I did a distro-upgrade. I'm wondering if it's been there for months, and only recently started acting up. Maybe it got corrupted or something, and only then started hanging up the system.

After removing it, I played my game again, on hard. Got all the way through Endgame: Singularity without a glitch. I've got my computer back! Now that I think about it, some other things have balked a little now and then. None of them as badly as Singularity, but odd little momentary hangs. Weird, isn't it? When I run any updates/upgrades manually, apt-get never interferes with other running applications.

I’d have a mischevious grin and a sadistic chuckle?

“Mike, this is getting _really_ old. Don’t tell us you have The Good Guy’s Gal tied to the railroad tracks again?”

Not, not today any, but have Your People call My People that we may come together as a team to do that before End Of Business on Monday.

The Long Blinks just hit! I’ll continue in the comments after I chills to one or more torrents.

You'll be wanting to "$ wget --recursive http://www.girlshighdef.com/images/" or so as you read this here screed.

I want to shop professor Ian from Mary Worth onto a Playboy Magazine cover, one of the "Girls Of" (some college) line. This because he only just narrowly escaped infidelity.

When I do a Bing Image Search for "playboy 'girls of'" I'm not met with any covers, but with some top hits of generously - for a freesite - high-rez Playments from Girls High Res Dot Com.

So I click the thumbnail to get the link, click the link then...

a "download.gz" file downloads into my Downloads folder. TF?

Being on an almost but not quite current rev of macOS, I figure I'm immune from viruses, so I click the .gz to unpack it - try that, LUNIX! - then click the "download" file. It opens right up in TextEdit to reveal...

... the markup that _should_ have been - but was _not_ their web page.

I've had this happen to me before, so I know full well what their problem is:

Their server has that page's MIME-Type set wrong, I expect to binary/octet or some such, and not text/html.

So here THEY"RE THE TOP HIT AT BING IMAGE SEARCH!!!! but they're not getting any ad clicks nor are their referral links getting any clicks.

I'll try a "site:girlshighdef.com inurl:wp-content inurl:uploads"... no, while that commonly works, it does not here.

HOWEVER!!!! That webmaster shall be flayed alive, not merely fired: every last page's Site Description is "Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *. Comment"

Now, I readily admit that every last website I've ever published has been A Multitude Of - non-pr0n Sins, but I have _always_ been diligent as to fixing them.

[bzipitidoo:] Then there's all the ruckus over Global Warming. An awful lot of people would rather suck up Big Oil propaganda than listen to climate scientists. Why? For most of them, there's no gain in adhering to climate change denial, but they stick to it anyway, and have no scruples against using 3rd degree methods to suppress and silence climate science, stuff such as cutting funding and threatening their jobs and even their freedom.

here

[PartTimeZombie:] The problem is that "your team" is wrong about climate change, and are being manipulated by people who directly gain from fossil fuels, but at least your team get to win right?

Stupid way to run a country if you ask me.

here

[khallow:]“And yet the environmental guys are way outspending the other side. Somethings not quite right with the narrative.”

[AC:] Addressing this separately. To me this makes sense.

The companies get to hide behind “nothing is wrong” and that is cheap compared to the independent attempts to show that there is something going wrong in the environment.

here

[AC:]You do realize that if it is true that big oil hid the negative effects of their and related industries concerning global warming that it is a huge savings?

A contrary viewpoint:

[AthanasiusKircher:] Other industries manage to employ paid scientists to "shill" for them all the time. Big pharma, food additives and nutritional research -- we all know that where ambiguous data CAN be exploited, industry can and has often hired researchers or financed research to help support its position. (And to be fair, I think many research scientists in these industry positions actually believe in the work they do.)

With the pockets of Big Oil and dozens of other related industries that would suffer from increased pro-environmental regulation to combat climate change, where is this army of paid scientists? And don't argue that it has something to do with tenure requirements or whatever, because Big Pharma, the big chemical companies, and the Food Industry has no problem finding scientists with graduate degrees whom they can EMPLOY and finance directly to publish research. If the data is really that open to interpretation, it should be easy to employ a bunch of debunking scientists. (And they probably wouldn't even lost a lot of money doing so, since they could probably charge huge speaking fees on the conservative circuit for these people.)

That's always the most confusing aspect of those who claim a massive conspiracy -- every other industry manages to find a significant number of scientists to shill for them when needed, despite the fact that such scientists are often bucking the research funded by non-industry groups and the government. Yet for some weird reason, it's claimed here on this issue that exactly the opposite happens: industry with big pockets is powerless to recruit an army of shills, and instead all the scientists are jockeying for the much smaller pockets of NSF money. If this is so easy for the government to do, how come it's so hard for them to achieve similar levels of consensus around problematic drugs or chemicals or food additives or whatever?

To all those people who think there's a massive, well-funded (that is, well-funded for an industry that has trillions of dollars in revenue!) Big Oil/fossil fuel campaign to sabotage humanity's efforts to combat climate change, I have this simple challenge. There's plenty of analysis of the few groups that allegedly support climate denialism and such.

Now, do the same for the pro-mitigation side. Include the big non profits like Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund, government/intergovernment agencies like the UK's MET, NASA's GISS, and the IPCC, and the many businesses that support pro-mitigation. Use the same metric for each side. Who spends more on propaganda?

Protip: if you get that climate denialists are spending within an order of magnitude of the other side, then you're missing something big.

THIS time they gave me the medicine that gives me really severe withdrawals when I don’t take it.

But just a seven day supply.

While my natural inclination is to go to the ER every seven days until someone else figures out how to get my Medicaid back, I know full well the ethical thing to do would be to fix my Medicaid problem myself.

As I am now amply medicated and so chock full of vim and vigor, when I get home I’ll put on Queen’s A Night At The Opera, turn the volume all the way up to Eleven then set into my bookkeeping until as the dawn twilight just barely lightens the sky, I shall have in hand the Profit And Loss Statement that the Washington State Health Departments wants from me to prove my income eligibility.

Oscars 2019 ceremony to go without host after Kevin Hart row

This year's Oscars will be held without an official host - for the first time in 30 years. The head of ABC Entertainment, which airs the Academy Awards ceremony, said it would instead highlight celebrities presenting the trophies.

Reports had suggested the broadcaster was struggling to fill the role - one of the toughest in US show business.

In December, comedian Kevin Hart pulled out of hosting the ceremony following a controversy over old homophobic tweets. He said he did not want to be a distraction and that he was "sorry he had hurt people".

Bud Light gets earful from angry corn lobby after Super Bowl ad

Bud Light’s Super Bowl campaign is calling out competitors that use corn syrup — and the corn lobby is not happy about it.

In Anheuser-Busch InBev’s ads, a medieval crew delivers a cask of unwanted corn syrup to Miller Lite and Coors Light. Bud Light is using the “brewed with no corn syrup” on its ads for the night.

Following the spots, the National Corn Growers Association tweeted at Bud Light that “America’s corn farmers are disappointed in you. Our office is right down the road! We would love to discuss with you the many benefits of corn! Thanks @MillerLight and @CoorsLite for supporting our industry.”

Pope Francis Acknowledges, For First Time, Sexual Abuse Of Nuns By Priests

Pope Francis, for the first time, acknowledged the sexual abuse of nuns by priests and bishops, including a case in which some clergy used women as sex slaves. He said on Tuesday that he is committed to ending the problem in the Roman Catholic Church.

His comments came in response to a reporter's question on his flight returning to Rome from Abu Dhabi. The reporter asked the pope about a Vatican magazine article published last week detailing reports of sexual abuse by clerics resulting in nuns having abortions or giving birth to children fathered by priests.

It's a habit.

I expect Momma's gonna be proud when I give her the great news.

I'll get an HIV test done sometime soon.

Also a "POC Glucose" test - Point Of Contact Glucose, with a droplet from a finger-stick and a handheld meter - was also normal.

Damn I'm Good.

At a cost not to the hospital but to The American Taxpayer of at least two thousand dollars, quite likely more.

This because just a few days before my cancer surgery on October 31st, the Washington State Health Authority quite reasonably requested my Proof Of Medicaid Income Eligibility. I spent what could well have been my last few days on Earth not settling my affairs nor saying goodbye to my loved ones, but snail mailing the link to Living with Schizoaffective Disorder to a whole bunch of people at Caltech.

This because Caltech was where I was the craziest, while at the same time everyone there had the very least clue as to what to do about it. But I digress.

The Proof Of Eligibility requires self-employed folk such as Yours Truly to submit Profit And Loss Statements. I at first intended to prepare mine in November, but spent that whole month overcome with nausea as I recovered from that surgery; my Medicaid was cut off November 15th.

Not wanting to have to call 9-1-1 for an ambulance to the ER just so they could give me a Seven Day "Compassionate Prescription", I started tapering off my medicine. That did not work, so I took the train to Portland's new Unity Hospital, which is only a mental hospital intended to relieve the city's many fine Emergency Rooms from being overburdened by us wingnuts.

At a cost to the taxpayers of perhaps five hundred dollars, they gave me a seven day supply as well as a tasty nutritious lunch.

This time I tapered off much more carefully, but shortly before running out concluded that I could not do without Trileptal (oxcarbazepine), which treats both seizures and mania - I was having brain seizures, including twice while driving my car - Hilarity Ensued that second time - so I went back to my regular dose. I took my last tablet Thursday night.

I figured by now enough time would have elapsed that the State Health Authority would regard me has having qualified for Medicaid again solely because of a self-declared Change Of Income. I registered for Medicaid again - the Washington Apple Health Plan - then called in my Happy Pill refills.

Mid-afternoon today I went to my pharmacy but knew to ask that they verify first that they'd been able to bill my insurance. They had not, nor could they find any record of my having Medicaid at all.

My Apple Health plan is administered by Molina Health Care. I checked their website only to find my Medicaid was suspended.

At least I managed to get to the ER on the bus this time.

I had to wait quite a long time to actually get my Happy Pills, but they were expedited when I pointed out that millions of tiny bugs were marching in formation all over my body. This because doing without does not make me crazy for quite a long time, but to cut off my Trileptal suddenly makes me quite physically ill.

I'm feeling just fine. Quite a clued-in and helpful social worker is requesting authorization for a Compassionate Prescription. Once he's got that, I expect I'll be discharged then will pick up my drugs of choice at the hospital's outpatient pharmacy.

Seven More Days, though.

But there _is_ some good news: that clued-in and helpful social worker clued _me_ in to the free volunteer tax preparation that's given at the public library each tax season. Their next such session is tomorrow; I'll go first thing.

I MADE ENOUGH SINGING JUST NOW THAT I CAN GET BLOWN THROUGH A GLORY HOLE BEFORE GETTING ON THE YELLOW LINE TO GO HOME.

A couple weeks ago there was a guy in the booths to each side. I rather dislike blowing other guys but do so anyway out of simple human decency. But TWO of them? What To Do With That?

In the end, I gave them both simultaneous handjobs. That seemed to work out OK. As a photographer - not at that precise moment - there was a certain intellectual interest to the visual composition.

It happens that I was uncommonly focussed on Soggy Jobs throughout the night until late in the morning. Perhaps it wasn't because I wasn't posting Fake Jobs, rather I was adding hand-edited index.html's to all my Country, State, County, Oblast, Province, District and Region directories.

That, and for a great many directories for which I didn't have the - as Wikipedia so aptly denotes them - the Administrative Divisions the locals actually _use_ like Region and Oblast in Russia, or Province and County as the Irish do.

I hypothesize - well at least I hope - that this will greatly decrease my Bounce Rate, increase the average number of pages viewed by each user as well as get me lots more Organic Links.

Now _I_ am the addict: I've had a headache for a few hours, now the nausea has kicked in.

I did not feel well enough today to make it to Portland to sing. Tomorrow is expected to rain heavily; we might even get snow. Likely that storm will last for a few days.

There is another friend who would likely buy me a few coffees but he's only just now having his first of the morning.

mdcrawford@gmail.com