68Fand misty drizzle. Still, I have plants that must get in the ground before I leave town. Therefore, I better get to it.
n
OH, and since I forgot on Friday, What did you do to prep this week?
Sat. Mar. 10, 2018 – early post, things to do
26 Comments and discussion on "Sat. Mar. 10, 2018 – early post, things to do"
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Cloudy and 51 degrees in Sanford (45 miles SW of Raleigh, NC) this morning. Rain possible this evening.
Three years of chores to get done as time permits. Have most of the materials sitting around but will need to buy odds and ends to complete most jobs well. Today I’m going begin to hang some pegboard by locating studs cutting the spacers that keep pegboard off the wall and drilling mounting holes. Monday I’ll have a helper to hold the pegboard while I fasten it to the wall.
I’m going Paint Balling this afternoon. The neighbors son is 14 today and they asked if I wanted to go with them. I’ve always wanted to try that, so why not. My age (72) didn’t keep them from asking if I wanted to go so I must be young enough that they thought I’d survive – lol.
Robert’s decision to write a book, lead to my decision to write one also. I’ve written little beyond budgets, requests for proposals, responses to request for proposals and five year plans.
I’ve got it started and like what I’ve done so far. It has “flashbacks” to earlier events. One of those events includes the use of a microwave oven in a Holiday Inn hotel room in 1990.
My question is how do I determine when Holiday Inn (or hotels in general) put microwave ovens in all of their rooms?
The second part of the question is there a site where facts like this are routinely asked? Internet searches about microwave ovens have been of no value, but I may not be searching properly for this type of question.
Or more generally how do authors fact/date check minor historical events like the above?
Thanks in advance.
From the author blogs I read, some research extensively, some just wing it.
You could look at historical photos of rooms, I’m sure there are sites dedicated to either vintage vacation photos, or brochures, or even Holiday Inn.
Don’t let that detail bog you down. Write it and move on if you can’t quickly verify it.
Our family got a Sears microwave sometime in the late 70s. But they were invented for commercial use in the 50s.
n
Re: Microwaves
You could always just say that “microwave in the room” was a pilot program or just being rolled out for H. Inn., if your plot needs it.
My parents bought a house built by a restaurateur in the early 70’s with a commercial Amana microwave as big as a conventional oven. It lived in the laundry room and was eventually replaced with a kitchen over the stove model in the mid to late 80’s. During retirement and when costs had tumbled, they would buy one each year during their Florida time share visit and gift it when they returned. (Thanks guys!)
My internet is from a local reseller of Uverse bandwidth, ~$40/month. Due to a billing snafu, I received an onscreen suspension notice yesterday. After straightening that out, Chrome and Edge on Win10 are having a difficult time finding quite a few websites, including this one. The connection times out. I changed DNS to Google servers but find that manually adding https:// prefixes to address bar URLs generally fixes it. The Android phone has no trouble using WiFi to go anywhere, so I’m not blaming the rebooted router. The PC has now been rebooted a few times as well. No proxy or VPN. Still can’t get to the woodpile report. Hmmmm.
@Robert Sprowl,
As to fact checking and novels, you should go over to Barbara’s blog and ask her…
Mild winds, mild temperatures, and mostly sunny.
And the Tri-City SWAT Team and the Kennewick Police Department (KPD) have closed off the old downtown area for an undisclosed action. Once again got this alert through my Ring Neighborhood Alerts before the notification on the KPD Facebook page.
Edit/Add-Just got this alert:
HOMICIDE MURDER SUSPECT BELIEVED PINNED DOWN
SWAT team just pulled in armored vehicle getting ready to go after what is believed to be Spokane homicide suspect(s) pinned down in a residence on W. Kennewick Ave (600-700 block area).
I am also now getting a live video feed from a Ring Cam that is in the area.
Better than Reality TV.
Just verified my suspicions that the electric car mileage equivalences on the new car window stickers are a total fraud and lie.
1. LA times on Sat. always includes a new car review. Today it was an electric car, Nissan Leaf, and the equivalent mileage rating was 100 mpg highway.
2. I went to an Edmund’s website where the equivalency was defined.
3. The electric motor consumed a certain amount of kWh per mile. That amount of electrical energy is converted to thermal equivalent, Btu’s. Using the heat of combustion of in a gallon of gasoline, the amount of gasoline required to produce that amount of heat is calculated.
4. Comparatively, it takes about 4 or 5 times as much gas to provide the same amount of heat that an electrical heater would consume if it were provided as much electrical energy as the car motor.
OK, what it does not compare:
1. Lady four doors down has her car plugged into household wiring.
2. Our nearest electrical generating station, four miles away, consumes natural gas, methane, CH4.
3. They do not calculate how much CH4 is consumed to produce that required electrical energy, kWh, for the car to go one mile.
4. They do not compare the heat of combustion for that amount of CH4 to the heat of combustion of gallon of gasoline.
5. Nor do they relate that amount of methane burned at the generating station to an equivalent amount burned by a CH4 powered compact car such as the Southern California Gas Company uses for company business.
AlGore: Any comment?
@Nightraker : WRT your DNS problems. Try opening a command window and typing in
ipconfig /flushdns
To flush your local DNS cache.
electric car mileage equivalences on the new car window stickers are a total fraud
But, but, the electricity that the car consumes comes from solar, wind or hydro. No electric car on the planet every consumes electricity to charge the batteries from a fossil fuel plant. It’s all those nasty houses and factories that are using fossil electric generation.
Don’t forget the Bitcoin miners.
I’ve got it started and like what I’ve done so far. It has “flashbacks” to earlier events. One of those events includes the use of a microwave oven in a Holiday Inn hotel room in 1990.
My question is how do I determine when Holiday Inn (or hotels in general) put microwave ovens in all of their rooms?
Not hotels per se, but this site might help you in your research.
Writing a book is sort of fun, especially when you get into the characters as you are writing it.
Making all of the pieces make sense, and maintaining the flow of the story while ensuring that the various pieces ‘match up’ to each other, is sometimes challenging.
I’ve been writing one book for about a year, and am up to 100K words on the first draft. My problem is that I haven’t quite figured out the ending. So kind of stuck there for now.
I think that Jerry said that the key to writing is to write. Even if it doesn’t match the current project. And to dedicate specific and on-going time blocks to the process.
And not getting distracted while writing.
Squirrel !!
I think that Jerry said that the key to writing is to write. Even if it doesn’t match the current project. And to dedicate specific and on-going time blocks to the process.
That works for software also. I used to be able to concentrate fully on writing software and could writes 100s of lines of C++ or F77 a day. Then I hit my 50s. Now, a good day is 100 lines of code. And it is trailing downward. I need to build a monk’s cell with an air gapped machine so I cannot browse instead of writing.
And email is the worst distraction. One should really only answer email twice per day. I check my email every ten minutes or so.
“But, but, the electricity that the car consumes comes from solar, wind or hydro. No electric car on the planet every consumes electricity to charge the batteries from a fossil fuel plant.”
YUUUP, that is comforting. Here if they were using fossil fuel plant electricity, its both 1 molecule of global warming CO2 and 2 molecules of H2O from one molecule of CH4. Whereas, back in Appalachia it’s all CO2 from coal burning plants!
country roads…..mountain mama….West Virginia…
I know this subject has previously been mentioned but: I’m looking for a decent drive copying program, hopefully for a dirt cheap price. I’ve got my late brother in law’s machine, and I’d like to simply copy the drive to one of my externals, then go through it at my leisure in order to retrieve mementos. In the meantime I’ll wipe Vista off the drive and use it as the basis for a Mint machine for a lady friend. Thanks in advance.
I check my email every ten minutes or so.
I’ve configured Thunderbird to check for new emails every 10 minutes, and to chime when one arrives.
Nevertheless, I check for new emails periodically in hopes of being distracted from whatever boring task I’m engaged in! 🙂
I know this subject has previously been mentioned but: I’m looking for a decent drive copying program, hopefully for a dirt cheap price.
Have you considered a docking station?
@Nick, RickH, et al.
JEP’s advice was to write write write, every day. Doesn’t matter what, but I find my brain gets rusty if I don’t. Same thing with crosswords, or Scrabble, or frickin’ maths.
I had an old wise English professor who said, “Writing helps you think, and thinking helps you write”. Truer words were never spoken.
As to the ending of a story, (and boy, OFD would like this!), my clan’s motto is is “Avise la fine”. I’ve never written fiction, but if I did, I’d start with the moral of the story and work backwards, like Aesop did.
Robocopy costs nothing and will do the job. Just get your switches right. Loads of examples online.
Other than that Easeus works well for cloning and other uses like resizing. Free version does most chores.
I ended up buying paragon software’s drive clone tool. Worked well. Needed to build a bootable thumb drive to run the pc , because I was cloning the c drive.
Sitting in the United club at the airport. Lots of additional security. 5 cops with m4’s in low ready position, no premier security line in the check-in lobby. Club change their policy and every person entering needs to scan a boarding pass to enter.
N
@pcb-Duffer, I second @dkreck’s recommendations of Robocopy and EaseUS as being the thriftiest/free ways to accomplish what you want to do. I do prefer EaseUS products, their free versions have a few feature limitations but they do not suffer from sluggish performance.
Robocopy switch info:
https://www.computerhope.com/robocopy.htm
EaseUS site:
https://www.easeus.com/
Landed in ABQ. Nice weather. 10F Warner than Santa fe.
N
Enjoy Albuquerque, Mr. Nick. Quite a change from Houston! I’m off to Cleveland tomorrow via Southwest for two days, drive to Detroit for two days, then drive back to Cleveland and home to Vegas Thursday.
Uncle Travelin’ Matt. This traveling is for the birds.
“Trump: “Maxine Waters A Very Low I.Q. Individual””
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/03/10/trump_maxine_waters_a_low_iq_individual.html
There Trump goes again stating the obvious.
Hat tip to:
http://drudgereport.com/
Actually, just got to Santa fe. Not much snow…..
N
Maxine Waters, low IQ? I’ve only had the misfortune of reading about her a couple of times, but it’s pretty obvious. When even fawning leftist press articles can’t hide the stupid, the conclusion is foregone.
I spend most of my childhood in Albuquerque. The mountains are lovely. The high desert climate is great. The city itself, meh, it’s a city, nothing special.
Which reminds me of something I always found hilarious: Tourist post cards with aerial views often show the city in a green landscape. The landscape is, in fact, covered with a kind of prairie grass, but it’s brown – definitely not green.
Uncle Travelin’ Matt. This traveling is for the birds.
Travelin’ Matt from Fraggle Rock would disagree with you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72DAmpVRe-Q