09:50 – We received orders for two chemistry kits and one biology kit this morning, which took us down to zero inventory on both kits. Fortunately we now have everything in stock we need to assemble 30 more of each.
Barbara spent yesterday afternoon watching Grey’s Anatomy on Netflix streaming while she sealed 30 sets of the regulated chemicals for the chemistry kits and then labeled another set of bottles for 30 more chemistry kits. That’s plenty to keep me busy for a while. She wanted to get ahead of me so that she can take the Thanksgiving weekend off from doing kit stuff and put up the Saturnalia tree and decorations. Bob the illuminated penguin is already out on the front porch.
While Barbara was labeling bottles yesterday, I had to open our last case of 1,100 15 mL bottles, so this morning I’m cutting a PO to order about 7,000 more 15 mL and 30 mL bottles and caps. I’m still ordering by the case, which is 1,100 of the 15 mL bottles or 1,500 of the 30 mL bottles. I though about ordering in bulk, but that would mean ordering 10,000 to 20,000 of each size, they’d arrive on a pallet rather than in large cardboard boxes, and the cost is only 2 or 3 cents less per bottle. So for now we’ll stick with ordering cases.
I assume that Barbara knows that there is a spinoff of “Grey’s Anatomy” called “Private Practice”? It varies and is quite good at times. Unfortunately, it is quite bad at times also, very inconsistent. I believe that this is “Grey’s Anatomy” ninth season and “Private Practice” sixth season. Wow, I originally said eighth and fourth seasons before I Wikipedia checked them.
So. There have been more seasons of Grey’s Anatomy and its spinoff than episodes of Firefly.
You guys keep trying to come up with economic, manufacturing and education data to show the decline of Western Civilization but you should just stop with the above statistic. All you need to know.
And the funny thing is that Netflix keeps recommending stuff for me based on the fact that Barbara keeps watching Grey’s Anatomy, despite the fact that it’s one of the very, very few series that I’ve rated one-star (hated it). Usually, I rate stuff I don’t like two-star (didn’t like it).
But at least I have Heartland, 92 episodes and counting. Whenever Barbara is away, I watch all five seasons straight through and then start again. I’ve now seen the whole five series three or four times, which I think is more than I’ve seen all of the episodes of Buffy and is probably tied with Firefly.
Incidentally, you and Mary should give Hart of Dixie another try. It gets better after the first three or four episodes. Barbara likes it, and I find it tolerable, if only for the two actresses who play Zoe and Lemon.
I see the Senate is rewitting a bill to read our email and acces our online accounts without a warrant. I used to use a PGP plugin with a couple of friends to see how it works.
Anybody here us PGP? Just curious how paranoid OFD is. lol
I use GPG (the free PGP work-alike) with people who are savvy enough to use it … ie, approximately no one.
“I’ve now seen the whole five series three or four times, which I think is more than I’ve seen all of the episodes of Buffy and is probably tied with Firefly.”
I dunno how U or anyone else can watch multiple shows like that over and over again; I might watch two or three of the movies each year and that’s it. That would be “The Man Who Would Be King,” “Barry Lyndon,” and “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” maybe a couple of others.
“Just curious how paranoid OFD is. lol”
Not paranoid, realistic. If we are in any way on the State’s radar screen, they have all our shit already. I assume I am. I do not plan to run off into the mountains and fire up a guerrilla militia unit and work the revolution; I’ll be sixty next summer. I am where I am and will stand or die right there. That said, it makes sense to force the bastards to work a little, so yeah, PGP or whichever suchlike barriers one might care to try would be good, also anonymizer email and web browsing, etc. But really, if they wanna snoop you out, they can and will, and it is, while not impossible, increasingly difficult to “disappear” in this world. (of one’s own accord, that is.)
I’m borderline Asperger’s. Rewatching movies/series, re-reading books over and over (I think I’m up to 17 times on Atlas Shrugged, but I may have lost count), and similar behaviors are not uncommon among Aspies.
Barbara, on the other hand, is exactly the opposite. If I suggest re-watching a Masterpiece or something, the conversation goes something like this:
Me: I think we should watch [title].
Her: We’ve already seen it.
Me: Yeah, but the last time we saw it was 28 YEARS AGO.
I see. Mrs. OFD and I are fairly evenly matched along those lines and generally do not care to re-watch stuff very often; she more than me, sometimes. Especially with music. I say variety is da spice of life, etc.
But I gotta see “The Man Who Would Be King” every year. Greatest buddy movie ever made. Period.
So far as I can tell, the same can be said for approximately everyone who’s “called” into the science and engineering fields. (I’m specifically excluding those who went into STEM solely because the pay is good.)
Note also that everyone on the planet (except for catatonics and such, I suppose) falls somewhere on the Autism Spectrum. Note further that the criteria for making the diagnosis are very vague and subjective and to some extent self-contradictory. The current trend of labeling a large fraction of school-age children as aspies based on essentially nothing almost makes me suspect that some pharma company is pushing it. But of course that would never happen.
But SteveF, science, medicine and education have made such tremendous strides, boldly into the gorgeous future, that now we can ascertain instantly the specific physical, psychological, physiological, mental, emotional, and other defects of our children, as defined by us, naturally, and the best remedies for them, again, as defined by us. Usually involving drugs and coercive techniques learned from North Korean POW camps of the early 1950s and the wonderful nostrums routinely prescribed by such as Dr. Spock and Carl Rogers. No Child Left Behind, mind you.
And speaking of minds, reminds, and apropos of nothing much; it occurred to me on my little drive in this morning that language is being twisted around and misused again by the usual suspects, this in regard to global climate change warming or whatever the buggers call it now. If one demurs in any respect from this ‘solidly established international scientific consensus’ one is in denial, and therefore a denier. See what they’re doing here? One is then like unto a Holocaust denier, because that was and is pretty much the most common use of the word in describing someone who falsely denies what actually has happened. So if you disagree with all those brilliant scientists and politicians, you are on pretty much the same level as a neo-Nazi Holocaust denier, I guess. Just sayin…
You were doing fine until you mentioned brilliant politicians, at which point your narrative destroyed my suspension of disbelief.
I used to use PGP about 10 years ago, but I lost interest, as did the pal I swapped encrypted e-mails with. I was also looking into anonomous retailers but never even got started before I lost interest in that too.
I once heard that IP v6 uses end to end encryption. Is that ever going to really take off?
The politicians must have been brilliant to routinely so pull the wool over so many hundreds of millions of peoples’ eyes over the centuries. Or all those people were so bloody stupid. Or both.
Why would an internet protocol use end-to-end encryption out of the box? Although it may well, considering how some of us at work just found out recently that new versions of AIX do not come with remote access, out of the box; one must hie oneself to the nearest actual console, believe it or not, to do anything. So who knows?
IPv6 supports encryption differently from IPv4, but it is not automatic.
I would love to use encrypted email, but – as Chuck notes – the usability just isn’t there for non-technical users. Until some sufficiently large group or company pushes a sufficiently simple-to-use solution, it just ain’t gonna happen.
In any case, encrypted email doesn’t necessarily buy you much. First, it is still possible to see *who* you are exchanging mail with. Second, the email is unencrypted on both end (on all ends, if there are multiple recipients), which makes it pretty easy to get a copy of it. Finally, see http://xkcd.com/538/
Yeah, you can only do so much these days; in general, the bedrock rule of thumb for IT-related situations is that if the machine is connected to the net, it is open season. Defend it as best you can, while knowing that at best you’re half a step ahead of intruders. (or, of course, if the machine is physically accessible to others).
But the State’s army of snoops and spies grows larger and if we somehow trigger an alert flag somewhere in their systems, they can zero in on us pretty easily now. I would also expect their army of informers and supergrass types to grow as times get harder.
As the old vet duffer on “Hill Street Blues” used to say, ‘be careful out there, people.’
Rumor has it today that our PHB mangler may let us bail early today; I’ll believe it when I see it, but as a typical sys admin, I can sort of be in multiple places at once anyway, so whatever. Gotta round up some turkey somewhere on the way home and a handful of other ingredients; Mrs. OFD and I will be alone together for the day tomorrow, last I knew.
Watched the final completed episode of the new? “Sherlock” series last night; we both liked it a lot; esp. the character playing Moriarty. (I’m a sucker for the evil bastards of literature and film.) Hope they continue.
Gotta install a replacement power supply in the Windoze box at some point in the next few days and see if that fixes the bugger; took several large power hits a few days ago, but the RH box stayed good. And speaking of things electrical, we are trying to get somebody in this decade to look at our various old-time outlets and phone plugs and evaluate the service to the house; like pulling teeth so fah; they either don’t return calls or they’re “extremely busy.” Shit, maybe I’ll figure it out myself at this rate.
And some passing dirtbag cretin kindly dropped off several of their old tires at the rear of our back yard the other day, apparently, thus neatly evading the $4 recycling fee, I gather.
re the tires, cut them in half and nail them to a long board, then float the board in the lake. Next thing you know, there’ll be another confirmed sighting of Champ.
When I was a kid, all of my friends wanted to be Holmes. I wanted to be Moriarty.
Damn, son; that’s a neat idea for the tires! And the last really decent sighting with a pretty good photo of Champ was right outside our freaking windows in the bay, taken from the adjoining town park on the shore.
As for the Sherlock Holmes characters; in the books IIRC, Moriarty wasn’t portrayed very fully; all the emphasis was on Holmes and Watson. In this tee-vee series, the guy playing him, Andrew Scott, does a great job. What a psycho!
Finally, see http://xkcd.com/538/
Oh man, so true! XKCD is the modern day version of Dilbert.