09:46 – Barbara arrived home around 6:00 to loud acclaim. She thinks Colin didn’t miss her because he’s my dog. In a sense, that’s true. He’s the first-ever dog we’ve had that prefers my company to Barbara’s or my mother’s. And Border Collies generally are one-person dogs. But Colin likes Barbara, too. He made his displeasure at her absence clear the whole time she was gone, misbehaving and whining constantly. Border Collies think they’re in charge of almost everything, but there are exceptions that they concede are their humans’ responsibility. One of those things I’m responsible for is making Barbara come home when she’s supposed to. And Colin made it quite clear while Barbara was gone that I was failing in my responsibility.
I didn’t get any chemistry kits built yesterday, but I got a good start on the next batch of 30. Those are close enough to complete that I can quickly assemble one or a few as needed. At worst, there might be a one-day shipping delay. I’m going to print up another 60 sets of labels for the biology kits and 60 for the chemistry kits. Labeling and filling bottles is the most time-consuming part of building the kits, so we’ll be doing that every spare moment.
17:24 – I was just looking around Netflix streaming for something new to watch when I came across Primeval, a British show. It’s kind of a nature show, set contemporaneously, but with dinosaurs trying to eat the scientists. I watched only the first few minutes of the first episode, but I kept thinking that what these guys need is my .460 Weatherby Magnum, with armor-piercing bullets. The .460 with standard loads delivers 8,000+ foot-pounds at the muzzle, more than the .600 Nitro Express. It’s also a bitch to shoot, with free recoil of 100+ foot-pounds force. That’s about five times the recoil impulse of a typical .30-06 rifle, and more than three times a 12-gauge magnum with heavy loads. Not something you’d want one of the girl scientists on this show trying to shoot. Of course, it’ll also shoot through an elephant lengthwise, literally, as long as you don’t mind paying $14 per round.
I’m sorry, even if I liked dogs that much border collies are way too high-strung for me. No sale.
You actually have a .460 Weatherby Magnum? Holy batshit, Batman! I guess you’ll be ready if them scientist buggers ever get around to cloning Triceratops or Allosaurus. I may give you a ring if we spot Champ again up here (sightings remarkably like Nessie, a plesiosaur, maybe, in a deep lake with channels to the Atlantic north and south…)
No, the .460 WM is too much gun for me. It was too much gun when I was 25 years old. Nowadays, the recoil would probably hospitalize me. But, on the plus side, it is one of the very few rifle rounds, along with the .50 BMG, that’s legal for shooting whales. And, presumably, plesiosaurs.
I saw a guy shoot a 458 magnum in Alaska a few decades ago. We were out fishing for a week in the middle of nowhere and had a grizzly bothering us. He shot that thing downstream a couple of times and the griz took off. At one point the griz was 30 ft away from me and standing on his hind legs, way taller than me (I’m 6’1″).
I think that you need a RPG for an Allosaurus if the sizing is right from the “Land of the Lost” movie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VY9ZRoEZaY&feature=related
Or The Judge’s last words from the Buffy episode Innocence: “What’s that do?”
One of my favorite episodes, Sir! Right up there with the first Halloween episode, “Band Candy” and “Earshot”.
OFD wrote:
“I’m sorry, even if I liked dogs that much border collies are way too high-strung for me. No sale.”
Then get a boxer. They’re very placid with their owners, and most of them are dumber, rather than smarter than you.
No more dogs for me after the current golden retriever finally kicks off, and I may just help him along, too. Regardless of any alleged intelligence; I tried a couple of the Dean Koontz books a while back and just couldn’t deal with them anymore; super-intelligent golden retrievers saving humanity, etc. Of all the breeds….
No thanks; I’ll stick with our cats; they are fairly clever and clean and take care of themselves and they do what I tell them. Cheaper food bills, too. And no damn rodents in the house; who am I to bitch about the occasional bird? There’s zillions of ’em.
A few birds would be quite welcome at my place… 🙂 Perhaps even just one.
I’m still working my way through Veronica Mars, which RBT recommended a while ago.
Now that it’s not streaming I have to do the stone knives and bearskins thing, actual spinning media. Gah. To add injury to insult I had to go buy a new player as the old one had died from, I guess, lack of use.
Okay, what are Windows people using for an e-mail client? I’d like to use Thunderbird with POP, not IMAP. Any other suggestions?
I use Thunderbird for my work email, and I’m pretty sure it’s configured for POP, not IMAP.
I use Outlook 2010 and connect to multiple email accounts with POP with no issues.
Outlook 2003 here. POP to multiple accounts—no problem, except all mail must go to a single Inbox. I tried T-bird, but I use a forwarding email address as my primary email. It is not a mail account however. T-bird refused to allow setting it up so my mail looks like it is coming from the forwarding account, with return and replies to the forwarding account. No problem doing that with Outlook.
Outlook 2003 here, too. I am also trying out outlook.com, the revamped Hotmail.
Thunderbird with pop for my earthlink account and imap for my gmail. They appear as to different sets of boxes but you can set up a single inbox as well under local. I have lots of forwards from other names as well. TB allows for multiple identities and yo can choose any when composing. When replying it uses the identity that matches the one used to send to you but you can over ride that.
Thunderbird on Windows 7 x64 with 16 GB of ram and POPping from our corporate domain sitting on google apps (gmail++).
“no problem, except all mail must go to a single Inbox.”
Not true with Outlook 2007 or 2010. You can have email go to separate accounts, files, or whatever you want to call it. I have five email accounts and they all pull to different Outlook files, different inboxes as it were.
I believe that Thunderbird can automatically move email from your inbox to any folder based on who the TO: field is. This is part of the message filtering functionality.
Outlook 2003 can do that too, but it should know where mail comes from, and direct it to where you want without having to create a bunch of rules. And Ray says newer versions can do that natively.
Meanwhile, last month I had a situation where there was more or less continuous sporadic network activity. I have not run anti-virus software in years, and got spooked. Installed the latest AVG free version. It found nothing.
I believe now, that the cause of the sporadic activity was the “Rapid Fire” method that Weather Underground uses to update various weather station reports every few seconds, which I often have open. Funny thing is that this activity continued running, even when Firefox was closed and its process was not showing in Task Manager. The network activity I was spooked by, was exactly the same as when Rapid Fire updates are turned on via Weather Underground.
AVG caused such a performance hit that I removed it this morning. Seems like every program wants much more RAM than I have got these days.
Are you sure you have removed AVG? AVG is a virus, from my experience — can’t be killed, can’t be uninstalled. Quacks like a duck…
gmail here, since it came out, no worries, usually, no problems, usually. Nearly zero complaints over years. Free.
Thanks folks, I think I have a licensed Office suite hanging around on DVD somewhere, perhaps I’ll try that.
Firefox behaves strangely at times, and crashes more than I’d like, so I’m a bit skeptical about Thunderbird.