09:49 – Barbara is cleaning house this morning. She has friends coming up tomorrow to spend the day visiting the craft stores and similar places in Sparta. The weather won’t be ideal for that. When I took Colin out first time this morning, we were already at the high for the day, about 54F (12C). It’s to get colder and colder throughout the day, with a low of 23F (-5C) with gusty winds later today and possibly freezing rain. Tomorrow’s high is to be only 39F (4C), but at least most of the frozen stuff should be gone.
Kit stuff today and continuing through this coming week, as we have time to spare from Christmas preparations.
“… 54F (12C)…..”
Reminds me of some chiding that I received on another forum (not HardwareGuys) from a Special Needs guy. He preferred the MKS while I used inches, feet, pounds, °F, BTUs, etc. It was expressed that I might not be smart enough to use MKS.
I concurred and stated that I would switch when I felt that I was smarter than the Wright Brothers
I started adding metric numbers to most things I post after several readers from overseas commented that they weren’t used to traditional measures. Like most American scientists/engineers, I’m comfortable with either, but I sympathize with people who grew up using one or the other and can’t intuitively figure out the one they’re not used to.
Being comfortable with either/both, I will say that I regard metric as a totally artificial system with no human referent, while traditional measures are human-scale.
Twelve below freezing here in the high desert of California this morning. Real degrees, not the fat Canadian kind.
I was having dinner with a friend last night and he mentioned going to the local Costco for propane. I was a little surprised because he already has a large storage tank on his rural property.
It turns out that the company that fills it charges using retail pricing – about $3/lb, whereas Costco is selling it for around $2/lb.
You can buy for about $100 a portable (portable for a guy with a couple of F-250’s and a front loader) tank that takes about 100#. So his first couple of fills paid for themselves- this is barn/shop/house use.
I assume you mean per gallon. The last time I noticed, the Winston-Salem Costco was filling standard 20#/5-gallon tanks for $7.50, but that was probably three months ago. Two or three weeks ago when we were at Blue Ridge Co-op to order our big propane tank, they had a sign out front that they filled 20-pound cannisters for a flat $9.00. That works out to about $1.80/gallon, but of course they often don’t have to put a full five gallons in a tank.
Back before I decided to install a large propane tank, I compared prices on empty 20-, 30-, 40-, 50-, and 100-pound propane cannisters. I found that the 20-pound ones were significant cheaper per gallon stored than any of the larger ones. Costco was selling 20-pound ones for less than $25, so I picked one up to add to the two we already had. We always have one on the grill and two full ones sitting there.
“Twelve below freezing here in the high desert of California this morning. Real degrees, not the fat Canadian kind.”
10-20? Mojave, Adelanto, Big Pine,….?
Frost on my grass and roof here last night…..mid-60s (°F) today.
Slim, from coastal Orange County.
“Twelve below freezing here in the high desert of California this morning. Real degrees, not the fat Canadian kind.”
10-20? Mojave, Adelanto, Big Pine,….?
Frost on my grass and roof here last night…..mid-60s (°F) today.
Slim, from coastal Orange County.
I started adding metric numbers to most things I post after several readers from overseas commented that they weren’t used to traditional measures. Like most American scientists/engineers, I’m comfortable with either, but I sympathize with people who grew up using one or the other and can’t intuitively figure out the one they’re not used to.
What? No Kelvin?
Living in a border region for four years, I picked up the trick that 28 degrees C is approx 82 degrees F. Also — shorts weather stops at 14 (near native Floridian — shorts at Christmas is a God-given right), Vantucky Spring is a high above 10, and daytime high of 5 means I’d better have the down coat.
Regardless of which system you grew up with, Portland Airport provides a huge clue about the prevailing weather with a Columbia store at the exit of the secure area. If you miss that hint, the shopping center at the first highway exit/train stop features a Carhartt store.
I prefer metric but grok all imperial measurements. I do prefer to use feet and inches for height and length. I have very little idea when degrees F are mentioned. I know my metric height (186 cm) but always think of it as 6’1″.
A lot of measurements in the Manhattan Project were metric…
Like many things I grew up with, I’m sticking with the old Egyptian, Roman and English systems of pounds and feet. It was good enough for all those buggers, thus good enough for OFD. 195.8 cm tall but ain’t it just easier to say 6’5″? 108.85 kg.
And 17.14 stone.
Overcast w/drizzle and 34 degrees F. Dropping to 0 tonight and teens tomorrow and then back up to high 20s and low 30s the rest of this week, with intermittent snow showers. Looks to be a WHITEY Xmas!
Speaking of which, I hope MrAtoz was not abducted by zombie strippers out in Lost Wages and he’s probably just lounging on the beach with a daiquiri on some Caribbean island and flying his drones while MrsAtoz works. Either that or he got called up to fly choppers again over the Spratly Islands and Formosa Strait.
Human weight should be given as moles of hydrogen, to make people feel fatter and damage their self esteem.
Human height should be given in rods, to make people feel shorter and damage their self esteem.
Length and circumference of human primary and secondary sexual characteristics should be given in Angstrom Units, to sound more impressive and repair their self esteem after all the previous damage.
Wrt metric I figure that I have tho translate from metric, anyone who cares can translate the imperial. Of course, I’m not a savage,I do science in metric.
Nick
-22.8 F this morning at 7:00 AM. Hello to all of you in the tropics from northern Minnesota. We may get up to 0 F today. I’m in front of a fireplace right now.
“Hello to all of you in the tropics from northern Minnesota.”
Yes, from the Banana Belt and citrus groves here in northern Vermont tropics, hello to you, too. Heat wave today and tee-shirt weather again, at 34.
https://westernrifleshooters.wordpress.com/2016/12/18/gov-the-red-green-alliance-and-the-perpetual-asylum-process/
Yeah, ten years behind what is happening now in France, Germany and the UK. Sounds about right.
New England Patriots beat the Broncos 16-3 and are now 12-2. AFC East done, next up, the playoffs, and then a fifth Super Bowl win. Hey, if tRump can do it, so can they.
I guess everybody that used to post here has been rounded up by the ThoughtCrime Police for double-plus-bad-think. Buncha haters, anyway.
Or else y’all are just champing at the bit and waiting to see Oprah interview Moochelle, so the latter can bitch and whine some more about how hard it all is and there’s no hope, etc., etc., and she lived in a house built by slaves, blah, blah. Then she and Barack Hussein Soetero will be off for their speaking tours, books, more “community organizing” for the BLM and FSA, and raking in more millions now that they’ve seen how Larry and Field Marshal Rodham do it.
Well, tomorrow’s the big day, haters, so tool up and get ready for the Golden Hordes to descend on your ‘hood.
Is that football or basketball?
Been busy. All that terrorist-supporting underage gay animal porn, purchased by laundering the money from selling drugs to prostitutes of color and weapons of mass destruction to altRight racists, doesn’t download itself, you know.
(Yes, I know I missed some of the ThoughCrime Police bugaboos, but you try working any more in smoothly.)
Seems like there’d be a conflict of interest interfering with Oprah’s journalistic integrity. Aren’t they both in competition for Most Reprehensible Fatass of the United States?
From the Taki Magazine week this past week:
“What is certain is that there are currently more hate-crime hoaxers in America than there are Klansmen.”
http://takimag.com/article/the_week_that_perished_takimag_december_18_2016/print#axzz4TF72xTKc
I imagine the nooz will just get wackier through the next month or so; hold onto yer hates, you haters!
“Is that football or basketball?”
Yikes. OK, in basketball you are very likely to see much higher scores. And there aren’t as many criminal thugs in the NFL as there are in the NBA. I think. I’ll get back to ya on that.
“Been busy.”
Oh my goodness gracious, you HAVE been busy, haven’t you? Hats off!
“Aren’t they both in competition for Most Reprehensible Fatass of the United States?”
I believe that title was retired by a Mr. Michael Moore, but he has since possibly seen the error of some of his ways.
Temps to hit teens and zero and so on tonight with wind chill facta being well below zero, 10-15 below, in fact. I don’t care. Keeps the riff-raff away.
I probably WILL care when I’m 83 and can’t haul in the fucking firewood anymore, or hike into the woods to snag deadfall and transport it back here and no one’s making heating oil deliveries anymore and the Grid is down anyway. Of course I probably won’t make it another 20 years and my plan is to go out in a blaze of glory.
I’m down where “it all started with a mouse.”
I’ll post shoot my security experience when I get back.
Kids are grumpy, my feet and back hurt, my knees ache, and I’m worn out.
Nick
“I’ll post shoot my security experience when I get back.”
The mouse habitat there is reputed to have pretty dahn good security, so we will be very interested in your experience accordingly. I hope to visit Floriduh again–in a B52. Likewise Mordor, Babylon-on-the-Hudson and Hollyweird.
“Kids are grumpy, my feet and back hurt, my knees ache, and I’m worn out.”
I get worn out just thinking about it. Too dam hot and humid there, too many bugs and venomous reptiles and pythons eating alligators. All that jungle chit liable to instigate bad flashbacks, too. I’ll stay here where are no alligators, pythons or venomous reptiles, and the breeze is so refreshing coming off that newly forming lake ice tonight.
What did I do for prepping this weekend? Research into a bunch of stuff, mainly involving radio gizmos and gimcracks and a nice headlamp thing that would work for wife’s jewelry making and my firearms fiddling.
Also got CentOS 6.8 loaded onto one machine along with Nethserver 6.8 very nicely, and Fedora Design Lab onto a second machine and learned a new Linux thing, to wit:
If none of your keyboard “F” keys or the Escape key get you into the BIOS and boot options and you have Grub as the bootloader, go ahead and hit the “c” for command-line and do the “fwsetup” command and Bob’s yer uncle. Had to do that for the machine I was changing from CentOS to Fedora.
So now that that’s done, I may load Qubes on a fourth rehabbed machine, and meanwhile I’ve got that office space I was using for all this stuff back to the shortwave (Tecsun PL-880) and scanner (Uniden BCD996XT) and Kindle Fire accessories. So far I’ve got intermittent SW broadcasts from South America, apparently, and the usual local dirtbag population calls for the state police and Saint Albans PD and Franklin County Sheriff’s deputies.
What about firearms, OFD? Decided I need a slightly narrower belt for two of my holsters and that was about it, except I also noticed up in the attic someone, probably me, had left a carton of boxes of .22LR. Exciting.
Wife just called from Oahu and her plane got delayed so now she won’t get into Moh-ree-all tomorrow until at least 4:30 and back here, I’m guessing, around 7-9 PM. She just missed Obummer’s motorcade and circus caravan and SS agents, as he and his lovely family were nature hiking today in the botanical gardens there somewhere.
I saw her pics on her FaceCrack page and the catamaran she was staying on in the hahbuh last night has solar panels on it. She thinks they power all the juice on the boat, but no running wotta yet on it. The guy who owns it is fixing it up; got a nice little Murkan flag on the rear by the fishing rods.
And now back to watching the Tampa Bay Buccaneers basketball team get slaughtered by the Dallas Cowboys hockey team.
There is still hope for parts of Europe:
https://westernrifleshooters.wordpress.com/2016/12/18/viktor-orban-2017-will-be-the-year-of-revolts/
They need to wipe Brussels and Munich from the map like we need to do for Mordor.
“They need to wipe Brussels and Munich from the map like we need to do for Mordor.”
Oh no! I really liked Munich when I visited it in January, for three days: transport infrastructure, museums, concert hall, people, everything. And a thought striked me then: they really worked a LOT to build the city and everything they have, so they will have a LOT to loose in case SHTF. And from this, I concluded that they will DEFEND fiercely their way of living and city, and NOBODY can mess with them. That’s the impression I got while wandering around: a strong united people, to which you have to ADAPT or be GONE. (What a difference from what I feel in Romania: mostly nothing to defend, nothing to miss here).
Back then in January, the migration was still great, so I expected to encounter its effects in Munich, as this city was the entering gate in the country. But I didn’t!. You had to look very attentive to find some: a few people there, a few people here, that you *might* label as recent immigrants (and that around the railway station). Things were calm, quiet, healthy. A pleasure to travel around. That was my experience there, and I enjoyed very much.
ADDED: Sibiu(where I am) has three (and soon four) daily flights to Munich, making the latter the main hub through which we can travel/be visited to/from all over the world.
I’m down where “it all started with a mouse.”
Headed there in the middle of January. Staying at the Animal Kingdom resort. Former exchange student is coming back and wants to see Harry Potter and the Magic Kingdom, wife wants to see Animal Kingdom.
Booked a package deal with Disney for two nights (3 people) with park entrance and meal plan. Meal plan was advised as food is very expensive in the park and saves you money. Also getting the wrist bands with scheduled entrance to certain attractions in the Disney world. Ordered online and Disney will send the stuff in the mail. Well organized machine.
I’ll post shoot my security experience when I get back.
The Mouse has good security in Florida.
Worry more about getting past the MCO TSA goons without missing the flight home.
And, as for the prices charged by the gas stations closest to the airport, yes, it is perfectly legal under Florida law. Plan accordingly.
And now back to watching the Tampa Bay Buccaneers basketball team get slaughtered by the Dallas Cowboys hockey team.
Four coaching changes in five years. It is a miracle that the basketball team is playing this well.
“It is a miracle that the basketball team is playing this well.”
Some of us are old enough to remember Tony Dungy’s coaching and the plays made by Warren Sapp. Well, they put up a good fight against the Dallas hockey team but in the end couldn’t hack the mission with their 22-year-old center. The 39-year-old pitcher, Tom Brady, however, took the Denver chess team to the woodshed.
RBT: Yes, sorry, gallons and not pounds. I was in a hurry, 300 miles of pre-Christmas driving and visits on Sunday.
As of last night Walmart here will swap standard BBQ tanks for $15.82, about $4 less than the rate as of December 1st. Odd, but perhaps more people use them for actual BBQ’s in the summer rather than than heating/other in the winter?
CowboySlim: Lancaster, alas. I missed out on a chance to buy a cabin and five acres bordering the national forest out Adelanto way, about 10 years ago, and have been kicking myself ever since.
I’ll be returning thru Tampa, so will miss the tourist lines.
Got lots of wdw advice for anyone that has never been. But that will have to wait for a keyboard.
Crowds and weather are both reasonable.
More later.
Nick
Some of us are old enough to remember Tony Dungy’s coaching and the plays made by Warren Sapp.
Sapp, Brooks, Lynch, Warrick Dunn, and Mike Alstott’s thigh muscles.
I’m old enough to remember that Brooks, Lynch, and Brad Culpepper (a playing partner *crucial* to Sapp’s development in the NFL) were Sam Wyche draft picks/hires.
http://mmqb.si.com/mmqb/2016/11/21/themmqb-peter-king-nfl-podcast-sam-wyche-cincinnati-bengals-heart-transplant
I’ll be returning thru Tampa, so will miss the tourist lines.
TPA is a better choice for a flight as long as you avoid rush hour on I-4 and 275. Grown ups run the airport, but sadly not the roads.
La Teresita is only 10 minutes from the Tampa airport’s rental car counter. Great Cuban food, and the quick service side is open 24 hours on the weekends, Thursday through Saturday night.
http://www.lateresitarestaurant.com/en/tampa_cafeteria/teresita_cafeteria.php
We had our wedding reception there.
Reminds me of some chiding that I received on another forum (not HardwareGuys) from a Special Needs guy. He preferred the MKS while I used inches, feet, pounds, °F, BTUs, etc. It was expressed that I might not be smart enough to use MKS.
Real men use Rankine.
Reminds me of some chiding that I received on another forum (not HardwareGuys) from a Special Needs guy. He preferred the MKS while I used inches, feet, pounds, °F, BTUs, etc. It was expressed that I might not be smart enough to use MKS.
We support seven different dimensional unit systems in our software:
1. US @ STP (F, psia, lbmol/hr, …)
2. Metric @ NTP (C, kg/cm2, kgmol/hr, …)
3. SI @ NTP (K, kPa, kgmol/s, …)
4. Metric @STP (C, kg/cm2, kgmol/hr, …)
5. SI @ STP (K, kPa, kgmol/s, …)
6. Europe @ NTP (C, barg, kgmol/hr, …)
7. Europe @ STP (C, barg, kgmol/hr, …)
STP = 60 F, 14.696 psia
NTP = 0 C, 1.0 atm
In addition to those broad settings of twenty different dimensional unit categories, our users can choose from many different types for each category, such as seventeen different pressure types (psia, psig, bar, barg, mm Hg abs, …).
@Dad just has to lighten things up with his favorite system, the Furlong/Firkin/Fortnight (FFF). I wasn’t too surprised to find a Wiki on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFF_system
I was introduced to this system early in my Nuke Submarine Navy “Career”. It is amazing what we would do when out and about in the submarine (days of boredom fallowed by minutes of controlled chaos). We would even have competitions on the mess deck with people wagering smokes, candy, and sausages as they watched the elimination matches. Slide rules were the weapon of choice. I won my fair share of matches. Fun was had by all.
Wow, we were easily amused and it didn’t require batteries or WiFi.