08:37 – Friday the 13th falls on a Friday this month.
Well, it’s finally happened. Until now, I’ve been making up solutions for science kits in 2-liter Erlenmeyer flasks, 2-liter soft drink bottles, or gallon (3.8 L) jugs. But one of the solutions I need to make up is the Fertilizer concentrate part A for biology kits, which is supplied in 125 mL bottles. A gallon of Fertilizer A is sufficient for only 30 kits, and I need to make up sufficient for 90 kits. Rather than make up 3 gallons (~12 L) of that solution in separate 1-gallon batches, I decided to make up a single 3-gallon batch. That means I need a largish mixing vessel. Fortunately, I happen to have some 19-liter polypropylene beakers on hand, AKA 5-gallon buckets from Home Depot. They’re bright orange, granted, but they’re clean, sturdy, and chemically resistant.
Unfortunately, they’re not graduated, but that’s easy enough to address. My shipping scales have one-gram accuracy and resolution up to 20 kilos, so I’ll simply tare an empty bucket, transfer 11,356 grams (3 gallons) of water to it, and use a permanent marker to draw a line at the 3-gallon level. Actually, I’ll probably just do the line at 12.5 liters and make up sufficient solution for 100 bottles rather than 90.
Not only is it Friday the 13th; it’s also a full moon. I pity the cops and nurses tonight.
You may laugh; I saw and heard it with my own eyes and ears back in the day.
Mrs. OFD and Princess are staying on a houseboat tonight and tomorrow night in Half Moon Bay, where I had thought Sir Francis Drake landed, but I was mistaken; he and his crew landed and actually stayed a while amicably with the local Indians north of the Golden Gate at what is now the Point Reyes National Seashore, where I used to hang out sometimes during my time with Uncle out there. Then Princess leaves for Santa Barbara and wife for some remote site at 8,000 feet 300 miles from Denver. She does these gigs at high elevations occasionally and then gets back here to very wet sea level and it knocks her for a loop; a super dose of oxygen.
Another day of overcast and rain we did not need.
One of my partners lives at 8,500 ft north of Denver for five months of the year. He loves it. His wife has to sleep with O2.
http://windowsitpro.com/paul-thurrotts-wininfo/short-takes-june-13-2014
“Good news for Intel: Strong PC outlook raises demand for chips”
“Here’s the type of news we haven’t seen in a while: Microprocessor giant Intel this week said that revenue in the current quarter would be about $700 million more than originally estimated because of better-than-expected PC sales. Likewise, its estimates for the year have changed to show year-over-year revenue growth; previously, Intel had said that revenue would be flat year-over-year. I know you’re waiting for a punchline here, but let’s be honest: After 8 straight quarters of declining PC sales, we can all use some good news.”
Nice!
Does Intel still make motherboards? I’m thinking of specing out a new PC and have forgotten a lot of what I used to know about this stuff. Who makes the best mobos? Asus? Best memory? Crucial or Kingston? Best drives? WDC? Best cases and power supplies? Antec?
I haven’t followed that stuff in a long time, so your best bet is probably to contact one of the folks who do follow it.
My favorite motherboard was the Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H:
http://www.amazon.com/Gigabyte-CrossFireX-NVIDIA-Motherboard-GA-Z77X-UD5H/dp/B007R21JK4
That is a LGA 1155 socket. It looks to have been superseded by the Gigabyte Z97X-UD5H motherboard with an LGA 1150 socket:
http://www.amazon.com/Gigabyte-GA-Z97X-UD5H-Networking-Express-Motherboard/dp/B00JKCHDKY/
I am partial to Gigabyte motherboards since Intel dropped their desktop motherboards. Specifically the UD5H variants since they are usually better materials and features.
I read Maximum PC magazine for their component level recommendations. They list a “budget pc”, “baseline pc” and “performance pc” by component each month at the back.
I still use the Antec Sonata case for it’s quietness but they seem to have been dropped.
I use the Intel SSD drives nowadays for primary drives, 240 GB for $169:
http://www.amazon.com/Intel-2-5-Inch-Internal-Reseller-SSDSC2BW240A4K5/dp/B00DTPYT78/
If you need more space then WD makes both Caviar Black (7200 rpm) and Caviar Green (5400 rpm) drives up to four TB. I use the Black for servers and Green for backup drives. Caviar Green drives even stop spinning after a couple of minutes of non-usage. They spin up quickly and are ready to run in 30 seconds or so.
Thanks. I tend to leave computers running literally for weeks at a time, I mentioned this to a salesperson at a computer store that was recommended to me and he suggested WD Reds.
I just got my electricity bill, it was amazing. I think I’ll have to start shutting down PCs when not in use.
The one single speedup that you can do is change your primary drive to a SSD. My Windows 7 x64 boot time on my desktop is 11 seconds.
I also have major tinnitus and want silence in my computer case so I use the Antec Sonata. They are not perfect by any means but quieter than most. If interested then you might want to take a look at:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/
Here are the Maximum PC recommended components in three levels:
http://www.maximumpc.com/build_pc_recommended_builds_june_2014
I like that performance PC; maybe I’ll start acquiring the parts for it and throw Windows 9 on it when I have them all. Then convert this one to another Linux distro. I’m becoming the Greg of northern Vermont now; better be careful; at last count: three desktops (Windows 8.1, RHEL 6.5, Fedora 20), five laptops (CrunchBang, Mint 16, two with Windows 7 that wife uses, and one that is basically defunct and disassembled), a netbook (Santoku on Lubuntu) and a Kindle Fire HDX. I also dig the idea of an SSD for the o.s. and a multi-TB drive for the data. But still working on how to get a faster and more secure net connection via our ISP on my end, given the years-old Westell/Wind River modem/router here. And we rarely use the wireless part of it; just about everything here is hard-wired.
Rain has finally ceased and I can see patches of blue sky to the south. Next few days should be pretty nice around here, except for the clouds of skeeters. I hope my lenient and careful treatment of the bat a couple of weeks ago will bring him and his pals back in droves ASAP.
Haha, just tried to do the “healthy living assessment” thing at the VA web site via my account with them and got this:
“Due to system issues, HealtheLiving Assessment is not available at this time. We ask that you try again later.”
Shinseki. Probably sabotaged the system just before he got the ax. That bastard.
Fellow ‘Nam vet, too. Ima gon kick his ass now. Caint trust officers, present company excluded. Maybe.
Since when did Father’s day become a national holiday? About half of Houston is leaving via any road possible. We are waiting for tomorrow morning to go see the wife’s father in Carrollton, about 300 miles north of here. He got moved to a critical care nursing home last week and we think it is a good time to check his condition out.
re the new mixing flask: I’ve heard of industrial chemistry referred to as “bucket chemistry”, but I don’t think you’re supposed to take that literally.
Son#1 is 3/4 of the way through a BS in Chemical Engineering. I’ll have to think of how to share this innovation with him in a way that will maximize spit-takes.
Japan’s last incident with their nuclear breeder reactor was because the dude doing the mixing of the reactive material was suppose to mix a gallon of aqueous fissionable material at a time. One day he found a five gallon bucket and decided to use that instead of the one gallon bucket. Somewhere between two and three gallons, the mixture in the bucket went critical and he had a bad day.
Son#1 is 3/4 of the way through a BS in Chemical Engineering.
Congrats!
Yeah, congrats and best wishes to Son #1, SteveF; even if all the shit blows up his abilities and knowledge and skillz will be vital anyway. And if it doesn’t, well, I’m pretty sure he’ll make out very well indeed.
Father’s Day a big national holiday now? I never woulda figured that. Fathers have been dogshit in this country for a long time now. But from the sound of it, it’s just another holiday weekend to take off, eat and drink like pigs and watch tee-vee. Mine is gone, since 1998, and wife’s died when she was a baby; jury still out on my performance and/or lack thereof as a stepdad.
Got the new Tails o.s. installed on a boot USB and will be looking into various new options and the persistence feature.
Caint trust officers, present company excluded. Maybe.
lmao That’s why I flew choppers. Quick git-a-way.
I prolly tole this dam story here before; second tour I’m on a new choppuh and the pilot and his sidekick thought it would be ultra-amusing to take sharp turns at tree-top level so any loose shit I had in the doorway, plus me, maybe, would tumble on out. By that time I had a very short fuse. So I swung the 60 over to them and said “do that again.”
No more bullshit from them ever again; they screwed up and dint realize they had a bonafide psycho buck sergeant on board well into his second tour.
Other than that incident, I got on famously with pilots and other aircrew peeps. They was always full of laffs and ready to party down like it was 1999. I ‘spec MrAtoz was a reg-lar fella dat way, too.
“Son#1 is 3/4 of the way through a BS in Chemical Engineering.”
Hope it all works for him. When I was 100% through with same I tried CPI, of course, but did not connect.
Went with aircraft, spacecraft, missile and rockets for 45 years. Harboring no regrets.
jury still out on my performance and/or lack thereof as a stepdad.
Dude, half of the battle is just staying around and not running off every time it gets real.
I’ll tell you what the other half of the battle is when I figure it out. Like that will ever happen!
Well, I’ve stuck it out, and it’s been wicked trying at times, but a lot of the distress and pain involved over the years was on account of me anyway. Vast percentage of the credit goes to Mrs. OFD who put up with my sorry ass and still does, despite the hell I put them through.
No idea what the other half of the battle is, either; I guess we’ll both find out one way or another.
Temps have dropped down to the low 50s and it’s more like a fall night than near-summuh; but the next few days look to hit the 80s with sun and blue skies.
Now to continue the second season of “Longmire;” second episode last night had this experienced wild-west man of the mountains humping uphill during a blizzard by himself after a crew of murdering prison escapees with a hostage; jeans, cowboy boots, cowboy hat, long jacket and gloves and that was it. At one point he fell and rolled downhill into a stream and got completely soaked. I can attest that even a guy in his evident shape at that age would most likely not have survived. Deep snow, soaked to the skin, and lost his rifle, too. Managed to make a fire eventually in a conveniently located abandoned house with a stove. I reckon the cold would have killed his ass long before then.
I was figuring what I’d wanna be wearing and toting for such a haul, assuming I could not wait for backups and choppers; synthetic underwear, socks and glove liners; insulated heavy pants; wool gloves or mittens; layers of upper body wear, topped by an insulated parka; wool face mask and hat; snowshoes mandatory; flashlights with extra batteries; easiest possible portable fire-making tools; hatchet; heavy knife; first-aid kit; Cliff bars; canteen; water tablets/lifestraw; .308 scoped semi-auto and a hundred rounds; .45 ACP and spare mags. It’d be slow humping but the bad guys’ Sno-Kat machine was gonna run outta gas at some point anyway. Track them down and kill them one by one.
Much better to wait for backup, Sheriff Rambo. Warm, comfy choppuh, MrAtoz at the controls, door gunners…piece of cake.
Longmire is not familiar to me, so I don’t know if it’s post-apocalyptal or what, but I have seen people make similar stupid decisions in getting somewhere when something’s gone wrong.
Option 1: Set out yourself right now, on foot. If you’re in really good shape and don’t run into any problems, you can make 50 miles a day, or maybe 80 miles for one day and nothing the next day or two.*
Option 2: Wait a couple hours for your dad to come to you with a car, or a friend who owes you a favor to come get you. Hell, take a couple hours to break into a parked car and figure out how to get it running without a key. Then drive. Three hours from the start mark you’ll have gotten farther than you would have in a day on foot.
But of course, sitting around waiting for someone to get to you is hard. No, much better to just start walking. You’ll get there eventually, right? Unless you die…
One of the people I saw try the “just walk” approach didn’t seem to realize that two one-quart canteens and an empty gallon water pouch weren’t enough to take you through a day in the desert. He got lucky; he was walking along a sort-of road and someone came along. (This was in Ft Huachuca, July or August, 1990 I think. Yes, there are reliable rainstorms every afternoon, but they’re brief and if you don’t have a plastic sheet or something to catch the water, they don’t do you much good. Anyway, PFC Dumbhead got lucky. Got seriously reamed out because he didn’t wait at the training area for someone to come back and get him, but he didn’t die. And rumor had it that whoever was in charge of the training got seriously reamed out for not noticing he was short one, but I didn’t see that.)
* Back when I was young, fit, foolish, ambitious, dumb as a post, and trying for a shot at US Special Forces, I ran 74 miles in 14 hours, carrying water, minimal food, and some weaponry in case of attack by feral critters. I was then about crippled for the next two days.
By the time I went to flight school in 1979, the Army had already cut way back on SERE training for us regular pilots. Fort Rucker still maintained a POW camp training site, but only as a museum. All pilots used to have to spend a “tour” in it. Modeled on some SEA shithole somewhere. The theory was that Army choppers (other than SF) would never be so deep not to be recovered in future operations.
35 years ago, how time passes.
What a day in the news:
Obummer on Iraq: Um ah er derp derp derp.
IRS on Lerner: Ah gee we lost all those emails.
Chelsea Clinton paid $600K by MSNBC Geez
Even were I still young and fit at the level I was at age 20, I would have known better back then not to go up that mountain in a blizzard after a bunch of heavily armed murderers. Having already humped many miles in the north Maine woods during a typical winter. Let the winter kick their asses and kill them off, until we can get choppers up there and machine-gun the fuckers. Not gonna save a hostage by dying yerself on the way up.
I did the SERE caper in the Philippines at the start of my second tour, followed by more combat training in-country, which itself had followed the previous combat training back in Texas. I found myself training with Green Berets and Marine LRRPs there, which I thought was beyond negligence on somebody’s part, as I was just a lowly AF security policeman. But we managed.
Ironically, 35 years later I’m doing a three-week stay at the VA hospital up here and I discover when I report to my assigned room that my roommate is an ex-Seal. Why do I keep getting stuck with these fucking maniacs? Anyway, we ended up one night keeping him from leaving the bathroom to go and kill the guy who he said had raped his daughter. Long story. Maybe that’s why they put me there; I was twice his size. (he could have kicked my ass in a nanosecond, of course). But the brass never uses common sense; “Hey that Seal is a loose fuckin cannon down there.” “No problem; we’ll stick him in with OFD; guy’s an ex-cop, fuckin huge.”
Jesus wept. But all’s well that ends well. Dude got me addicted to Rolled Gold stick pretzels, though. Bastard.
Obummer on Iraq: this, with the VA thing and the Bergdahl thing? Probably nobody cares, except the remaining handfuls of people in the country who have some common sense left.
IRS losing Lerner’s emails? SOP. If they hadn’t, I’d be shocked.
Chelsea’s payday? Well at least she doesn’t have to claim/deduct used skivvies like her mama did back at the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock. Can’t wait to see what the Obummer kids pull down eventually. It’ll have to be lots more, of course.
Yah, I saw the bit about the lost emails and thought “Well, of course they were lost.”
If they had balls, brains, and an honest desire to do what’s best for the American people, the House of Representatives would throw IRS brass — at least the director and the CTO or equivalent — into jail for contempt. They’d also take a huge axe to the IRS budget. Get rid of all leadership positions and zero their computer budget, maybe.
But that assumes the House had balls, brains, and an honest desire to do what’s best for the American people, and I figure they’re running about 0 for 3 on that.
We have nobody.
Nobody.
It will take pretty near Apocalypse now to straighten things out here.
“Longmire” is totally cool. And if you think falling in the stream is bad, wait until season three.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1836037/
Barbara and I just finished series two of Longmire a couple weeks ago. I had the same reaction OFD did to that scene where Walt trudges off into the mountains in the midst of a blizzard without any gear. I commented to Barbara that in reality if anyone was stupid enough to do that they’d find his body after the spring thaw.
I got two SSD based systems in 2010, the SSDs in both failed after very little use. I’m deeply skeptical of SSDs, and haven’t noticed that much of a speed improvement.
Thanks for the suggestions though.
I’ve got 4 ssd drives running now in my shop. All Intel. No failures. Three of them over a year each.
Some of the early SSDs apparently did have problems. I’ve had nothing but good luck, though. My (heavily used) laptop – I replaced the SSD with a larger one early this year, only because I needed the space.
My main desktop has an SSD that is also too small – but I can’t take the time to reinstall everything just now, so I live with it. It’s probably 4 years old now.
Lack of TRIM support in Windows caused a lot of problems with early SSDs.
I’m sure Greg’s issues with the SSDs are because he’s using them upside down.
I’m sure Greg’s issues with the SSDs are because he’s using them upside down.
That is absolutely brilliant. I am going to rearrange all my SSD’s to keep the bits from falling out. You should write Intel and have them put a warning on all SSD packages. Otherwise I feel a class action lawsuit would be appropriate. The lawyers get several million, the SSD users get $0.50 off their next purchase of an SSD 500 gig or larger.
Hey, they are selling 1 tb ssds for $420 now.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00E3W16OU
Yep, the days of spinning drives are numbered.
Which reminds me of that 30-year-old IBM PC/XT I still have on a shelf in the basement. Eventually I’m going to use it to build a PC, but I’m waiting until I can have one million times everything that the original system had. A million times faster processor, a million times more memory, a million times more drive space, etc. But it’ll look just like the original PC/XT.
Fun project, you should write it up for Slashdot or the Maker sites.