08:41 – A bit of excitement this morning. At 0558, Barbara’s phone rang. She announced that the call was from the 508 area code, so we assumed it was a spam call. A minute or so later, her phone chirped to indicate new voice mail. She was checking it when my phone rang, and it was also a 508 area code. Barbara announced that her call was from LifeLine. We’re both on the responder list for Bonnie Tedder, our 89-year-old next door neighbor. So we immediately got dressed and headed over to Bonnie’s house.
When we got there, Barbara found Bonnie had been trying to get out of bed but couldn’t make it. She was upset and confused and unable to move. Barbara did what she could to calm Bonnie while I called 911. A sheriff’s deputy showed up a few minutes later, soon followed by EMS. Barbara’s initial diagnosis was dehydration and a possible UTI, which EMS agreed with.
While Barbara and the EMT’s were getting Bonnie ready to transport, I stood out in the kitchen talking to the deputy. I asked him how many deputies the Sheriff had. A dozen total to cover the whole county 24×7. That’s anything from one to three on duty at any given time, to cover almost 250 square miles of territory. When he told me that, I was surprised at just how quickly he’d responded.
While all this was going on, Barbara called Gene, Bonnie’s nephew, to let him and his wife know what was going on. They said they’d head over to the hospital to meet the ambulance. The EMT’s got Bonnie on the gurney and covered her up well. It was about freezing out with winds gusting to 60 MPH.
Once the ambulance left for the hospital, Barbara stripped Bonnie’s bed, we locked up, and then we headed back home to a very puzzled Colin, who couldn’t figure out what was going on.
Barbara forwarded me an email yesterday about the Alleghany County Ham Radio Club holding license training sessions at the library starting later this month. I called the contact number and had a long talk with Sam Burgiss, the contact guy. I signed up for the training sessions, although I probably don’t really need to take them to pass the Technician and General Class exams.
He said the local club was eager to get more members. It’s not a traditional ham club, he said. There aren’t any dues, any officers, or even any by-laws. It’s just a casual group.
I asked if they had an ARES group, or possibly RACES. He said they didn’t, yet, but that one of the county commissioners was an active ham and interested in getting an ARES group going to support local emergency management.
I told him a bit about my background and that I’d been a ham operator back when dinosaurs roamed the earth in the mid- to late-60’s. He said that was great, because they needed experienced operators as Elmers for the younger people in their club. That surprised me. Ham radio is one of those hobbies that I think of as being mostly older and retired people, but he said they had quite a few young people. The thought of myself as an old hand is a bit intimidating. I consider myself a newbie, but I’ll be happy to do what I can.
With the continuing discussion about Keystone Meats, I’ve now gotten several emails from people who are concerned that the 28-ounce size is too large for them to use at one time. Keystone lists all of their 28-ounce cans as 14 servings, but a 2-ounce serving seems a bit small to me. A 3- or 4-ounce serving size is more common, which yields 7 to 9 servings per can. So what do you do if there’s meat left over?
In normal times, obviously, you can just do what we do. If you intend to use the left-over meat soon, refrigerate it. Otherwise, freeze it. But in abnormal times, you may not have electricity and for most people that means no refrigerator or freezer. The solution is pretty simple: put the left-over meat in a ziplock bag, squeeze out as much air as possible, seal the bag, and toss it into a pot of boiling water. Boil the bag for at least a couple minutes, or until the meat is heated through, turn off the heat, and allow the bag to cool in the water bath. All of the bacteria in the bag are dead, and the meat should be fine sitting on the counter at room temperature for a fair while.
The only issue is that boiling is not hot enough to kill Clostridium spores, which are common in soil everywhere, and probably in your kitchen as well. The upshot is that once the bag cools, those spores may germinate and produce billions of Clostridium bacteria, which in turn produce botulism toxin. For that reason, you want to make sure to re-cook that meat very thoroughly before using it. Boiling does kill the bacteria and destroys the toxin, so the food will be safe to eat once it’s thoroughly recooked.
* * * * *
Two thumbs and two toes up for Bob and Barbara, way to go. You get a gold star for today. Now get back to work. 😉
Well, all the facts are not in regarding Syria and the “Liberal/Commie/Fascist/Scum” are already condemning Trump. Well I for one am proud of OUR PRESIDENT this morning. He let the guys who know how to take care of business really do their job for the first time in years. Vlad and the rest of the world now know that there is a new man in town.
Edit/Add:
Jerry Pournelle has a good opinion piece, that I agree with:
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/us-slays-a-dragon/
While I am not a fan of US intervention in foreign matters, I am glad DJT let the world know that he would not hold back.
RE: your adventure with Bonnie this morning: Keeping neighborhoods alive takes all of us, and we need to remind each other that we’re good people. As are our neighbors. I’m sure Bonnie & her family appreciate it as well.
Interesting bit of amateur radio trivia. The guy who inspired the term Elmer was an actual person. I think it’s people like him who helped build our country. Below is a quote from him that explains why I think that.
The guy deserves a Wikipedia article, but I can only find one original source for attribution. Otherwise I’d write one. I never met the man, but he helped make amateur radio (and the world) a better place. Now I need to go out and figure out how to be an Elmer, and not just in amateur radio.
Barbara has kind of adopted Bonnie, who’s three days younger than Barbara’s mom would be now. Barbara goes up to visit and check on Bonnie every day or two, takes her shopping or out to lunch periodically, and so on. Vickie, our next door neighbor on the other side, also visits Bonnie frequently, runs errands for her, etc. The county wellness check folks call Bonnie at 0900 every morning, and her nephew and/or his wife visit most days. So Bonnie has a lot of people keeping an eye on her.
Gene’s wife, Janice, just texted Barbara to let her know Bonnie is fine. No UTI, but she’s dehydrated. They’re keeping her in the hospital for a few days until they’re sure she’s okay to go home.
I don’t understand. What is this “left over” thing?
Kind of joking, but not entirely. If I were eating just the meat, I’d eat the 28oz can in one sitting. Sharing with my daughter, ditto, though I’m sure she’d complain about it. If I had cooking facilities and wasn’t just eating from a can, I’d make some kind of stew, feed whoever I was inclined to feed, and keep the stew simmering if there was any left.
WRT young folks and Ham/Amateur Radio:
Bob’s comment on “Elmers” caused a memory flash, I remember being “Elmered” when I was a young teen. The fellow (I cannot recall his name at the moment) was also a Boy Scout Troop Leader for another BSA Troop. I ended up getting all the Merit Badges related to Ham/Amateur Radio and remember many an evening scanning the bands and making contacts to get QSL Cards. You might consider this to have been the beginning of “chatting”, “Tweeting”, etc. In some ways I can see that an educated and inquisitive teen of today would find Amateur Radio fun and educational.
Yep. We’re planning to feed four adults plus Colin, or 4.5 people equivalents. I’d like to have 365 cans of meat on hand. We’re not there yet, but OTOH this county has 2.5 to 3 times as many cows as people, so if TSHTF we probably wouldn’t be short of beef.
I don’t recall much if any discussion about dried meats and fish, the ultimate prepper protein (?). Most of the Native Americans relied on dried meat and fish and I would say that this is a skill that needs to be revived. I’m not talking about jerky here, which must be carefully stored and only for a short time. When you look at the types of meat and fish that were dried most were very lean, which is important since a lot of fat would tend to turn rancid over time. Methods I am aware of involved sun drying and drying aided by a fire.
Any of you have any good references on drying meat and fish?
I have a “brick” of homemade pemmican, almost 7 years old. It’s made by drying and pulverizing meat and then drowning it in melted fat and letting it cool. This batch was ordinary ground beef mixed with pig livers, IIRC, and the fat was lard from the supermarket. Son#2 and I ate about half of this batch shortly after it was made, and declared it mostly edible. Not bad with salt, pepper, and garlic. Making it was rather labor intensive because the meat needed to be finer ground than ordinary ground beef. Drying it took longer than expected, which didn’t take too much human time but tied up the oven for most of a day.
Overall, not recommended. In a non-crashed economy you’d be better off putting your time and money into buying cans of meat. (And tubs of tallow or lard; you need those fats, too.)
We have a dehydrator, but pressure-canning is far better.
I do agree that while we have an operating supply chain, electricity, and petroleum fuels things link buying canned meats, using a dehydrator, and pressure canning are viable for now.
But what happens when the SHTF, or worse. We are losing basic skills and you have to do more than read a book to be successful and safe with “primitive style” meat/fish drying, same goes for vegetable and grain preservation. I’m not saying that you should use old methods to put up all your stock, but regularly practicing the skill to learn and become proficient for the time when it might actually be needed. As have been mentioned in other areas, make yourself valuable with skills.
We can still pressure-can if the grid goes down.
Indeed, all the intel/info is not in on the latest caper in Syria, but I’m still opposed to our interventions and want most of the bases and installations overseas closed and most of our troops brought home, period. We have ZERO business in Syria, or Ukraine, for starters, and we need to find some way of forcing the Chicoms and/or the Japanese and/or the SORKs to take care of the NORKs. In other words, the players in that region of the world. And I daresay if we pulled our troops out of the Korean DMZ, our worries about the NORKs would be at an end, finally.
Anytime we launch missiles, drones, bombs, or planeloads full of Marines, ask yourself “Cui bono?”
So can OFD. He puts his food in a jar, then has the nearby Wallyhogs sit on it. The pressure and the compressive heating will kill any germs. On the downside, no one will want to eat food processed this way.
The only reason the US might have business in Ukraine is, after the USSR broke up, Ukraine disposed of the nuke missiles in their country, in exchange for a promise of protection from Russian aggression. As should surprise no one, they were left hanging. As should surprise no one, other world leaders have learned from this.
The word new is redundant as used. I don’t buy the theory that Michelle Obama is a man, although I do admit it is more credible than the theory her spouse is a man.
Various bad guys (as we define them at any given moment) lurk about the town. The old sheriff didn’t do much about them, except once or twice, when his deputies got rid of a couple of them in particularly grisly ways and left those neighborhoods even worse off.
So the new man shows up, and to prove he means business, he blows away some random hangers-on along the boardwalk; “That’ll show ’em,” he says, blowing the smoke from his big manly smokewagons, except half the rounds failed to go off, but no matter, he’s got plenty of ammo back at the office in case he has to repeat this exercise.
nd I daresay if we pulled our troops out of the Korean DMZ, our worries about the NORKs would be at an end, finally.
Nope. The NORKs would still target us with nukes. Remember the US target map that showed them with Hawaii, Washington DC, Los Angeles, and Austin, Texas as targets? Most people went “WTF? Austin?”. But the NORKs have a reason to attack Austin. Samsung has a major manufacturing and R&D center there.
As for getting China to do something, I’m sure that’s a major topic of the president’s discussions with the Chinese this week. China has been cutting aid to North Korea and applying pressure. But there’s not much more that can be done. There are widespread shortages of food, clothing, and ammo in their military. Even the secret police are short of goodies.
Also, plenty of OPKs. But hey, they signed up!
“Remember the US target map that showed them with Hawaii, Washington DC, Los Angeles, and Austin, Texas as targets?”
Consider the source.
I can whip up a target map, too, and have pictures taken of me and my guys earnestly waving pointers around. Then upload it to the media and net.
I’m laughing at Libturdians claiming Coffin Cankles “The Legitimate President” would have a better plan than President tRump. Do they think tRump or Cankles make these plans? It would be the same people in the milspec community making the plan.
Assad got what Odooshnozzle should have given him. But, like my here Mr. OFD, it is none of our business. Bring all the troops home. Too much blood has been shed already. What did we really accomplish in Syria with a bunch of missles? It would have been better if President tRump went to Mar-A-Lago, positioned the carriers off DC, and dropped 50 T-Hawks on the Capitol.
“It would have been better if President tRump went to Mar-A-Lago, positioned the carriers off DC, and dropped 50 T-Hawks on the Capitol.”
+1,000,000
Just as it woulda been better for me to be hosing Foggy Bottom from a Huey about 45 years ago.
Our main enemy is right here at home, ladies and germs, behind the gates. Almost all of our problems elsewhere in the world can be laid at the feet of people right here. Going back 170 years.
#(*@(*&!#$
My backup woes have increased. Both of my backup drives are trashed. One is completely dead and the other has a corrupted file table. They were fine last time I used them, about a week ago. At a guess, one was dying as I was comparing the backups between the two drives, and in so doing caused the other to be trashed.
Not all is lost. My own hand-produced data, writing and software and whatever, is multiply backed up. What may have been lost is all the downloaded stuff*, including email archives and photos, and processed AV, processed video and photos and all that.
Bah. We now return to our regularly scheduled pissing and moaning.
* You can tell I’m upset because I didn’t even make a joke about having lost a terabyte of porn.**
** Metajokes about porn jokes don’t count.
Suggestion – if you’re willing to hear about it.
AppAssure – now owned by Dell. It works. It will cost you whatever it costs to set up a box of drives to hold the backups, plus maintenance, and will get you back as far as you’re willing to keep them. I have 4 or 5 TBytes going back 2 years on a little over 8 TBytes of storage. Every month my helpdesk guy copies a snapshot off to an external drive. It’s probably MORE than you need, but it’s been pretty rock-solid reliable for me.
It won’t help you now, but it could help in the future. I build a new BBOD every year or two and migrate backups. That’s probably more than you’d need, but it’s an option.
Metajokes about porn are the best jokes.
Yah, in theory I know all that and could have been doing all that, but I figured the two separate drives for the full data and the occasionally-burned DVD of “my” data would be enough. Surprise!
I may be able to recover some of the data, conceivably all of it, but I’m not hopeful. The drives were formatted as NTFS because I also backed up selected stuff from a Windows machine — my daughter’s stories*, browser bookmark files, and that sort of thing. The MFT on the one drive is corrupted, which is what is known as A Bad Sign. The replacement drives will be formatted ext4, probably, and Windows can be backed up by FTP or onto a friggin floppy disk for all I care.
* I got her into writing stories when she was 6. Hand-written at first, and now mostly typed or dictated**. They aren’t exactly classics for the ages, but that’s not the point.
** Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Highly recommended. I think well enough of it that I continue to maintain a Windows 7 machine just so I can run it.
Two thumbs and two toes up for Bob and Barbara, way to go. You get a gold star for today. Now get back to work.
+1 and the usual reward for a job well done is more work.
And more confirmation that RBT married well.
Yah, in theory I know all that and could have been doing all that, but I figured the two separate drives for the full data and the occasionally-burned DVD of “my” data would be enough. Surprise!
I always have an internal drive as the primary backup drive. And several external drives to backup to also. One internal drive at the home PC, three internal drives at the office spread amongst three PCs. Three external drives at home, seven external drives at the office. Yes, I am paranoid.
One backup == one device.
I used to say “if it ain’t spinning then it ain’t being backed up” but with the new SSD drives, not much is spinning. Except as the planet, the solar system, and the galaxy do go about their merry ways. But, I do not believe in archiving data, just archiving old backup drives, at least one every six months. I also maintain two file servers for the staff that they are encouraged to store anything on that they want to store for millennia.
And we still lose stuff occasionally.
RickH’s backup plan:
– laptop to desktop (one internal, one external drive); wife’s laptops to same desktop, Manually done via SyncToy process.
– desktop to CrashPlan (automatic, no worries, encrypted, restorable to any device)
Data in three places: laptop(s), desktop drives, offsite drives.
Any backup process that is not automatic, and not offsite, puts data at risk. IMHO.
Not worried about the CrashPlan data being exposed to unauthorized access.
My ‘changing’ data is mostly coding web site files, so they are also backed up to the web sites. And the web sites data (WordPress sites) are backed up daily to my email. Along with the backups that the hosting place (JustHost) does.
I’m mostly annoyed because of all of that lost porn. Especially the lesbian amputee midget animal porn. Do you know how hard that stuff was to find???
(Yah, still very bent out of shape about this, but I’ve recovered enough to resume my usual porn jokes.)
RE: Backups.
I have been burned too much in the past. I am now a data paranoid. I have a raid-1 set in my desktop. I have a USB-3 drive I do incrementals to. I have a home network NAS with Raid-1 for backups and sharing with the wife. And finaly I use JungleDisk (with mazon cloud backend) to do daily backups AND keep an in-the-cloud copy of my critical files.
Not cheap or easy but the thought of loosing my 60 yeras of family photos and critical documents makes it worth it.
If you’re an Amazon Prime subscriber, Amazon Photo offers unlimited photo storage as part of you Amazon Prime membership. I’m debating whether or not I want to renew our Prime membership, but I thought I would mention it.
I apologize. I confused Mr. SteveF w/ Mr. Lynn. The porn jokes should’ve tipped me off. I don’t know enough about what you do (SteveF) to make that kind of recommendation. The oil software stuff is closer to my current status, which is why I commented as I did.
And Mr. Lynn is right. Lots of backups. Mine just happens to be “easy” for me with an organization this size. That, and enough redundancy that I feel safe. Even offsite storage is covered (now).
Still sorry about the backups going teats up. That just sucks.
Belt, suspenders, another pair of suspenders and two more belts.
Do you eschew meat? Are you white?
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/446518/vegan-intersectional-college-writer-left-veganism
A drive failing is expected. Not welcome, but it happens and you plan for it.
Two essentially mirrored drives failing simultaneously is not expected, and annoys me.
I still think it’s what I said above, that one failed and then the driver or the OS or something spazzed in trying to deal with it and trashed the other drive’s file system. -shrug- Or maybe the NSA was jealous of my unparalleled collection of anime porn and they remotely trashed my machine in retaliation.
JimL says:
But what I hear is
If meat eaters acted like vegans.
Drive failures
We became suddenly paranoid at my CO when three high-end RICOH multi-function shared office printer/copiers suddenly experienced hard drive failure simultaniously. Since these three were the print/copy resources for Finance & IT & Legal a big red flag went up. We know malware hides on servers (just Linux boxes with printers attached) and were concerned that some bad actor had been literally reading our printouts then wippd the drives to destroy evidence. Thre dys of investigation and sleepless nights revealed a flaw in the RICOH software. There is a function that will regularly overwrite unallocated disk space to keep people from reading your mail. When thei feature is enabled and set to “DOD” level, once the drive reaches a certain capacity the wipe function will go crazy and wipe the entire drive. As these printers were installed simulatniously it’s logical they all hit the threshold level about the same time. Thanks RICOH …
While Barbara and the EMT’s were getting Bonnie ready to transport, I stood out in the kitchen talking to the deputy. I asked him how many deputies the Sheriff had. A dozen total to cover the whole county 24×7. That’s anything from one to three on duty at any given time, to cover almost 250 square miles of territory. When he told me that, I was surprised at just how quickly he’d responded.
When we left the Northwest, the two southwest-most counties in Oregon had zero law enforcement coverage on duty outside of the incorporated cities between 11 and 7. The residents didn’t believe it was necessary, but the prog Governor disagreed and was looking into a few crazy taxation schemes to force the issue.
(Yah, still very bent out of shape about this, but I’ve recovered enough to resume my usual porn jokes.)
Feel free to throw in some of your pungent fart jokes.
It won’t help you now, but it could help in the future. I build a new BBOD every year or two and migrate backups. That’s probably more than you’d need, but it’s an option.
Now this is a Bog Box of Drives (480 TB using 8 TB drives):
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/open-source-data-storage-server/
I’ll post this so SteveF can start rebuilding his sheep pr0n collection:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-07/pic-of-the-week-sheep-dog/8425222
Bet you’d like to be reincarnated as a Border Collie, Steve? 🙂
@SteveF If meat eaters acted like vegans.
One of my favorite jokes…
“How do you know when someone is a vegan?”
“Just wait, they’ll tell you.”
or gluten intolerant or lactose etc, etc…
… or color blind.
Thre dys of investigation and sleepless nights revealed a flaw in the RICOH software. There is a function that will regularly overwrite unallocated disk space to keep people from reading your mail. When thei feature is enabled and set to “DOD” level, once the drive reaches a certain capacity the wipe function will go crazy and wipe the entire drive. As these printers were installed simulatniously it’s logical they all hit the threshold level about the same time. Thanks RICOH …
How in the world did you figure this out ? I would be there a year or two and never get that answer.
This week, I am working on our Fortran compiler and interpreter that we have built into our software. It is beating me in to the ground …
And why we did not put a Basic compiler and interpreter into our software, I’ll never know …
Especially the lesbian amputee midget animal porn. Do you know how hard that stuff was to find?
Pffftttt, not if you film your own.
We have Ricoh copiers and are well pleased with them. They are head & shoulders better than the XXXXX copiers they replaced.
Thanks for the heads-up. Just checked – we don’t have that feature turned on.
Steady rain/drizzle all night and all day so fah; the local streams, brooks, rivers, etc. are all in full spate. But Sunday is supposed to be sunny and near 60, with Monday partly cloudy and near 70. April showers, etc.
Cleanup ops today on the back porch and running a couple of minor errands. My new bicycle arrived and I have to do some of the assembly so I’ve now got space on the porch to do that.
I guess we’re now into the weekend and waiting to see if there’s any more significant fallout/escalation from the caper in Syria. Plus the meeting with the chief Chicom today, where the NORKs were discussed and now the idea is being floated that the Chicoms don’t have any fucking control over them whatsoever. What that means from now on is anybody’s guess, but I don’t like the sound of it.
Time for some fun:
http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
Plot your likely outcomes for your AO. The link was in Creekmore’s email today. More fun than a barrel of monkeys. I figure our closest possible target is the Burlington International Airport due to the fighter-interceptor squadron stationed there. Also the Yankee nukular plant (decommissioned) way to our south, and Fort Drum over in north-country Vampire State. A hit on any or all of these would make life very unpleasant around here, but would also be SHTF of such a level that I doubt many of us would last very long.
Around here, we have two Navy bases, and several big bridges. Plus big seaports.
So, if a really bright light happens, that will be the last thing I see.
My home backup NAS drive running the raid that will let you rebuild from any one of the 4 drives had the BOX fail, not the drives. NEVER considered the control failing. Still haven’t figured out how I’m gonna get that stuff back.
n
nick, your data recovery will become possible as soon as you give up and reformat all the drives. That will be the trigger for a 100% functional open source solution to be released.
And why we did not put a Basic compiler and interpreter into our software, I’ll never know …
We embedded Python 2 into our VPN product at Death Star Telephone. That worked pretty well, but the junior developers got lazy with ctypes which caused all kinds of mystery crashes whenever the VC++ runtimes would get out of sync between the Python DLL and our main binaries.
I argued for Tcl on the “keep it simple” principle but lost out to the cool kids. Tcl is kinda obscure, but I’m always amazed at some of the calls I get looking for that expertise. The language gets embedded quite a bit, especially in semiconductor handling and network switching products.
My home backup NAS drive running the raid that will let you rebuild from any one of the 4 drives had the BOX fail, not the drives. NEVER considered the control failing. Still haven’t figured out how I’m gonna get that stuff back.
I assume that you bought another NAS drive on ebay and switched the drives out ?
And then swore to never use just one device for backup ever again ?
Grr. “We have to use Go because all the cool kids are using it!” “No one uses sql databases anymore! All the cool kids are using MongoDB!” “Waaaaah! Java sucks because its syntax for streaming operations on a collection of objects is different than Scala’s syntax!”
Now, I’m not saying all the herd-following “cool kids” need to be executed. A horsewhipping will do … for a first offense.
Belt, suspenders, another pair of suspenders and two more belts.
And two pair of Depend underwear 😉
WRT backup drives and cloud backup:
Some of you may recall that a short while back I had the HD in my main laptop fail. The Carbonite Image backup failed and the Carbonite online backup failed. The 2 Seagate HDs that contained images and backups made by Windows 10 and Macrium Reflect both failed (they both had been running constantly for 18+ months). My only saving grace was a 3rd WD HD that had images and backups made by EaseUS Todo and file and directory backups on iDrive. Since I was in the middle of taxes I needed to get some files immediately, that is where iDrive saved my bacon immediately so I could continue to work while EaseUs Todo restored the image and then brought it up-to-date with file and directory recovery.
Seagate and Carbonite are on my crap list.
Grr. “We have to use Go because all the cool kids are using it!” “No one uses sql databases anymore! All the cool kids are using MongoDB!” “Waaaaah! Java sucks because its syntax for streaming operations on a collection of objects is different than Scala’s syntax!”
Scala. Shudder. I’m struggling with Lamda Calculus right now.
Since I’ve been in grad school, I’ve learned Python well and developed a grudging respect for what PHP offers to get things online fast. Beyond that, it seems like a lot of wheels are getting reinvented. I’m looking at you in particular, NodeJS.
”
I assume that you bought another NAS drive on ebay and switched the drives out ?”
No one online could assure me that this would work, that none of the config or RAID data was on the box….
n
(I put it to the side in an “out of sight, out of mind” move reminiscent of the greatest procrastinators.)
I’m glad your neighbor Bonnie is OK, but hospitals are cesspit of infection. She should get out of there the instant she can.
I lost an uncle who went in for broken ribs to a hospital infection, it still shocks, saddens, and angers me when I think about it.
My maternal grandpa, a Navy vet of three years in north Afrika in WWII, told me quite seriously more than once to avoid hospitals at all costs; he said “You just go there to die.”
A belated tip o’ the hat to Mr. and Mrs. RBT for getting over to their neighbor’s house ricky-tick when she was in trouble. Hope she’s outta there and OK now and at home.
I agree. I call them plague pits, and I mean that literally. Doctors and hospitals sicken and kill more than they save.
You wanna know a good way to piss off any “medical professional”? Give them the stats showing that a good janitor prevents more illness and death than the average doctor or nurse. And he doesn’t have six-figure college debt to pay off.
(I found a breakdown on that some years ago, but can’t find it now. The calculation was somewhat bogus, in that deaths caused by medical error were counted against the medicos but deaths caused by improperly sanitized water fountains were not. But that’s not the point.)
Anyway, I’ve done this, when a doctor annoyed me. It pissed him off.
(On a side note, I find it odd that I so often find myself needing to piss someone off. Fortunately, I’m unusually skilled in this endeavor.)
“””My new bicycle arrived and I have to do some of the assembly so I’ve now got space on the porch to do that.”””
OK, I’ll bite. Tell us about the BICYCLE !
Went to an estate sale today, that advertised “prepper type food.” Big house in the country so it had potential.
Ended up being 4 buckets of “200 servings” of generic no name crap. Literally soup mix, noodles, flavored rice, pasta, and milk powder. Someone paid good money thinking they were doing the right thing to put some food by, and got robbed. The calorie count was 100 per packet, and I couldn’t figure out how many packets you were supposed to eat, but with only 4 packets, I’m thinking 400cal/day. Robbery.
Prepper food is one of those products that very few buyers will ever actually use and discover how crappy it is. I think there are a large number of suppliers that count on that to scam people. No better than thieves.
n
What they are selling is just more “security theater” of course.
“OK, I’ll bite. Tell us about the BICYCLE !”
Nothing too extraordinary; just a Diamondback Mountain Bike equipped with hydraulic disc brakes. Got it from Costco, delivered to our back door in a big-ass cardboard box. It’s “Extra Large,” so it should fit me and I can adjust the seat and handlebars anyway. Color: light metallic green. Great biking territory here, mostly flat lake watershed and occasionally rolling gently, with a few hills here and there if I get ambitious. I hope to lose some of my inner tube, ameliorate my back and sciatica issues, and do some slower-motion recon and intel gathering in the AO here.
“I find it odd that I so often find myself needing to piss someone off. Fortunately, I’m unusually skilled in this endeavor.”
I was like that as a teenager, and on through my mil-spec and cop years, but now I tend to try to avoid doing that, if possible, unless someone deserves it. I just don’t need the aggravation or hassle, plus the annoyance of finding decent burial sites.
“What they are selling is just more “security theater” of course.”
+1,000
Speaking of which; Mrs. OFD was notified today that she has to apply from scratch for the expedited TSA procedure with the airlines; she’s been in that deal for YEARS now but is apparently lumped in with everybody else, and also having to cough up 85 bucks, which she can use her United miles for, but it still sucks rocks. On top of all that she has to get to one of their listed sites to be identified, hand in more paperwork and get fingerprinted. (never been fingerprinted in her life; I have, probably a dozen times by now).
@MrAtoz and another frequent air travelers: y’all gotta do this shit, too?
Sounds like a good BICYCLE!
I have little experience with disc brakes, but they should be a big improvement over the recent version of rim brakes (term escapes me at the moment). Older cantilever brakes (on the first mountain bikes) were simple and effective, now “obsolete” of course.
Get a helmet, a good one! I also highly recommend gloves, if only for the instinct to put your hands out if you fall. Prevents hand skin protection flinching from trashing your face! Wear eye protection, too, duh.
I also always considered toe clips and straps to be safety equipment, but we’ll work up to that…
”’ Bless our hearts and other parts. ”’
Amen, get gloves for the bike, OFD. Are helmets compulsory over there? Get one anyway. You could get Princess to ride it – get some of the lard off her.
I’ve been an inpatient in hospitals twice in the last few years: 2014 and 2016. I try to avoid them like the plague. I tell doctors that hospitals are places to go to get sick.
Helmets. Bah.
A number of studies show — or purport to show — that helmets save lives and reduce serious injuries. So far as I know, all such studies are flawed or else the summaries greatly outstrip the actual findings. Bereft of evidence, what’s left is “Use your common sense. Of course a helmet will keep you from cracking your skull!”, which I categorize with “Use your common sense. If the crops fail, of course we have to find the witch who cast the spell!”.
@MrAtoz and another frequent air travelers: y’all gotta do this shit, too?
Southwest used to give frequent flyers preCheck for free, then the TSA started to require you get printed etc. That cost money, filling out forms, etc. We just went to McCarran airport and paid to get printed and get the KTN “Known Traveller Number”. It lasts 5 years and then another $$$ to renew. Another racket like drivers license. Domestic only, so consider getting Global Entry for more$$$. RICO act is null and void for TSA turds.
Case of stupid overcame me: I did a quick format of my main external 250G hard drive. Is there a way to recover the data?
There are numerous utilities out there, although I haven’t used any of them in years. The ones I remember did a good job of recovering all of the data from a drive that had been quick-formatted, although IIRC it’s much better to recover those files to another hard drive, USB stick, etc. ISTR Pandora and QuickUnerase as ones I tried that worked well.
I wasn’t wearing a helmet when I hit that tree between 6th & 7th grade. Had a concussion for a while and recovered. I’m thankful for the tree. On the other side of the tree was a 20′ drop to the bottom of a creek. Stone & shale.
That said, I generally wear a helmet on my bicycle simply because it’s the best place to mount the rearview mirror.
Those times I don’t have a helmet (I’m forgetful), I don’t let it stop me. I’ve had people walk up to me and start to lecture me on the importance of crash equipment. My face clouds up & I tend to tell them it’s none of their business. They generally leave quickly. While Teddy Bear is generally used to describe me, Grizzly has been used as well. I don’t suffer fools gladly, and I am the best judge of my own self-interest.
About that failed storage controller.
It has been my experience that the RAID information is usually stored on the boot sectors of the drives, and a replacement controller will be able to read that information and rebuild the array properly. Two controller failures in my tenure and both have reacted that way. Saved me a TON of time.
Given the value of your data, what have you got to lose? If it works, you’re out the cost of the controller. If it doesn’t, you’ll at least KNOW it doesn’t work.
Reminds me of the time back in 1980 or 1981 when I was off-roading in my Jeep CJ-7 with my girlfriend at the time, Lee Bowie. She wanted to try driving off-road, and against my better judgement I traded places with her. She’d seen too many Jeep commercials, and while roaring through the woods at speed she rammed a tree. She bent the front bumper, which takes some doing. It’s basically a steel I-beam.
She jumped out, saw what she’d done to my bumper, and started crying and apologizing. I told her I was happy that she’d hit the tree, and pointed to the dropoff about 10 or 15 feet past that tree in the direction she’d been heading. It was a 50 or 100 foot drop at about an 80 degree slope.
+1
(I don’t hold with this excessive +10000000000 and such. I regret that I have but one like to give for my commentary.)
WRT targets: Less then 50 miles from Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, our east coast launch facilities. I’m even closer to Patrick Air Force Base, home to Space Command and some of the launch monitoring commands. No point in prepping for that. 🙂
I have a raid 5 NAS and 2x USB drives (1 off site) for backup, That’s in addition to the primary locations. Overkill for music and pictures, but a good habit. Hmmm, one of the USB drives is beginning to slow down, so it is time to retire it.
There was a low of 56 last night, Winter strikes back. People here have no concept of cold or winter. Central Florida has been warm and dry this winter. Fire season has started early, but I have no complaints. I don’t miss shoveling snow or mud season. I do miss Autumn however.
I just assume helmets are a good thing. If people don’t want to wear one that’s fine, just so long as they don’t want to suck on the public tit if things go wronger because they weren’t wearing one.
I tripped in 2014, and slid head first into a wooden post. Week in hospital. Took weeks to get my balance back. There was a concrete post 15 cm from the wooden one I hit. If I’d hit the concrete one I might not be here to talk about it.
Apart from the major cities we had a few nuclear targets down here. North West Cape where US ballistic missile subs got their orders, Pine Gap and Nurrungar -all prime targets.
Canberra was probably a target in its own right but I lived in a northern suburb just one km from what was alleged to be the backup communications base for NW Cape. Not sure if it realy was but they shut it down about 15 years ago. Probably covered by houses now.
Backups: I’m a fan of having two very different backup approaches. The two I use are (1) a direct copy of data directly off of the NAS, and (2) StoreBackup, which gives me a single backup that covers multiple points in time (because it only backs up changes each time). The file-copy runs when I hook up a drive to the NAS. The StoreBackup runs automatically every day to an internal drive, which I periodically copy onto an offsite disk.
The StoreBackup copies have proven really useful. Someone trashes a file, and doesn’t notice it for a while. When was it last ok? Go back a week, a month, two months, etc. until you find the last good version.
Still, no matter how careful you are, stuff happens. I had a lot of stuff running encrypted, and synced the encrypted files over Dropbox. Turns out that there was some weird bug in the whole process (I suspect Dropbox), where a random few of the encrypted filenames got changed to all-lower-case, which screwed up the encryption, and also made the files “disappear” from the file list. This happened specifically on files I had not accessed in a long time, so I really needed those historical files. But each file got trashed at a different point in time, so recovery was a total pain. I eventually decided recovery just wasn’t worth the hassle.
The StoreBackup copies have proven really useful. Someone trashes a file, and doesn’t notice it for a while. When was it last ok? Go back a week, a month, two months, etc. until you find the last good version.
This why I do not reformat my backup drives until absolutely necessary. All further backups are really incrementals and I do not remove missing files (robocopy actually has that option). And I offsite an external backup every six months.
Check into Backup For Workgroups. A nice product. Will back up multiple machines to a single backup source, duplicates are not backed up, you can keep as many copies of files for as long as you like, and even deleted files are kept in the archive. The product will also mirror the backups on an additional storage device.
https://www.backup-for-workgroups.com
I used it where I used to work and many times was able to get old versions of files and deleted files.