Thur. Oct 15, 2018 – cold and wet

By on October 18th, 2018 in Random Stuff

57F and wet out. Just yuck.

Plenty to do still this week, even if there are only a couple of days left. Little motivation, lots of excuses (still not feeling right) but stuff needs doing.

Suck it up buttercup. (marvelous phrase that…)

Today’s news is yesterday’s news. I’m actually ok with more of the same today. It would be nice to catch my breath.

And now, gotta feed the kids.

n

50 Comments and discussion on "Thur. Oct 15, 2018 – cold and wet"

  1. Harold Combs says:

    Visited my audiologist yesterday for a hearing checkup.
    No further hearing loss. Current hearing aids working just fine. Simple ten minute visit. Then she tried to up-sell me to the latest whiz-bang technology. She showed me the shiny new Livio AI – First-ever hearing aid to feature integrated sensors and artificial intelligence. The hearing aid for the 21st century.
    Holy Cow Batman look at this:
    – AI technology “crafts” your listening experience to match your environment
    – Able to record and replay conversations
    – Able to provide real-time language translation
    – Can provide geo-location “memories” to remind you of location specific things
    – Can interface with Alexis or Siri for instant answers and device control
    – Can play streaming audio from Bluetooth devices
    – Receive and place calls from your hearing aid
    – Built-in sensors will count your steps and activity for health tracking
    – Will monitor social interactions to track “brain health”
    – Can provide location driven warnings and alarms
    – Fall detection feature will test for response after a fall and call for help if needed
    Of course, most of the features require connectivity to a smart phone but this is the direction the hearing aid industry is going. Provide a nice API for APP developers and the sky’s the limit. The hearing aid then becomes a Bluetooth tethered sensor and two way audio delivery accessory. At the moment, these are about twice the price of regular devices but competition will drive that down.
    Put your mind to work, what kind of APP would you want for your hearing device?

  2. Nick Flandrey says:

    From my FEMA daily update:

    Tropical Cyclone Michael
    Safety and Security
    • US&R: All 10 US&R teams released

    Food, Water, Sheltering
    • Shelters / Occupants: FL: 12 (-2) / 1,474 (+141); GA: 3 / 243 (+21) (ARC midnight
    shelter count)
    • USACE Blue Roof Mission installation to start Friday, October 19 in Bay County; 3 Right of Entry Collection Center locations established in Panama City
    • Received over 39,000 tarps (30,000 to Bay County), shipped 27,000+ Oct 17; 60,000+ by Oct 28; 350,000 tarps on order. Volunteer Florida installed over 1,340 tarps
    • 42 (-2) boil water notices FL; 50 (+12) active boil water advisories GA

    Health and Medical
    • FL: Hospitals: 5 closed, 3 partially open (ER only), 4 on generator power, 3 on partial
    generator power; Nursing homes: 7 closed, 8 on generator power, 1 re-entry complete,
    Assisted Living Facilities:12 closed, 11 on generator power, 8 on partial generator
    power, 1 re-entry in progress; 2 no power
    o 2 confirmed fatalities
    • GA: Hospitals: HHS demobilized from GA EOC
    o 3 confirmed fatalities;
    • Media is reporting 34 fatalities combined total

    Energy:
    • Power outages: FL – 122k (-13k); GA – 45k (-11k) (SLB as of 6:00 p.m. EDT)
    • FL: All transmission and substations expected to be reenergized by October 20
    • USACE: 14 generator installs complete, 5 installs in progress, 44 assessments
    complete across impacted areas
    • Fuel points established in Bay and surrounding counties supporting responders

    Transportation
    • Roads / Highways: Assessment of state bridges complete; all county
    bridge assessments to be completed today in FL
    • Railway: Six short lines remain suspended in FL Panhandle area; expect
    minimum of 3 weeks to resolve

    Hazardous Waste
    o FL: 14 wastewater facilities non-operational, 25 partially operational, 7
    with unknown status; Bay County wastewater facilities requests being
    met, EPA analyzing potable water samples
    o GA: One wastewater facility non-operational; 10 are partially
    operational; 76 with unknown status

  3. Ray Thompson says:

    The IRS is really screwed up. I have been in a fight over my 2016 taxes over investment income. Their numbers do not match mine, not even close. IRS claimed I owed $1,100.00. I went through my stuff again and found that I failed to report some investment income, buried on the back page of a multiple-page 1099, easy to miss.

    Thus I figured that I owed an additional $480.00 which I sent in a check. The calculations being done by TurboTax. The IRS responds saying that I paid too much and now am due a $270.00 refund. I do not agree with their assessment on $64.00 for self employment tax resulting from going back to my former place of employment to help with some issues which was reported on a 1099.

    But based on the IRS assessment that I have overpaid by $270.00 I will give up my fight over the $64.00. Somewhere the IRS records are screwed up and their response that I am due a refund is incorrect.

    So I will accept their response even though I think they are incorrect. I am certainly not going to do anything to disturb the refund. Let them be incorrect in my favor.

    However, I am probably a marked person and will not be surprised if I don’t have to go through this for 2017 taxes and 2018 taxes. The IRS is evil and vindictive.

  4. Harold Combs says:

    RE: IRS
    In 1995, my son, at 21 years old, was murdered. I was devastated. It took months to be able to function normally. I never filed a tax return for 1995. In 1998 the IRS told me I owed some outrageous sum in taxes and penalties, far more than I could afford. Therefore, I made a payment plan. For 7 years, as I worked around the world, I paid $250 a month. Finally, in 2004, I wrote the IRS asking how much longer I needed to pay. They sent me back a nice note saying I had not only paid my obligation in full but had overpaid. They included a check for $21,000 almost the total I had paid in. I didn’t complain.

  5. Ray Thompson says:

    RE: IRS
    The problem is their system is complicated even the IRS cannot get everything correct. I have dealt with people in the local IRS office and I think I knew more than the IRS representative. Left the office after they gave me incorrect instructions.

    Now the IRS has my investments messed up. Nothing matches the IRS number even though what I reported was correct, matched the 1099. I cannot even figure out what they have done and I suspect the IRS cannot either.

    They included a check for $21,000 almost the total I had paid in

    They should also have paid interest. You make a mistake you get assessed interest. No filing is 5% of the amount owed per month to a maximum of 25%. Mistakes are calculated at 0.5% per month. The IRS makes a mistake and they should pay interest and would argue penalties as their mistakes are generally on purpose. Good luck getting interest from the IRS.

    In my case the IRS says I owe $11.00 in interest, no penalties as penalties cannot be assessed for mistakes.

    At this point I am not going to argue. I am $270.00 to the better, the IRS is wrong, but I have documentation they are correct. So at this point I will do little to rock the boat.

  6. nick flandrey says:

    Stories like those are why I find paying a tax accountant and enrolled agent to be a bargain.

    n

  7. lynn says:

    _Voyage (Powerless Nation) (Volume 2) _ by Ellisa Barr
    https://www.amazon.com/Voyage-Powerless-Nation-Ellisa-Barr/dp/1501021621/?tag=ttgnet-20

    Book number two of a three book EMP apocalyptic series. I read the well printed and bound POD (print on demand) book self published by the author. I have also purchased the third book in the series and am reading that now.

    15 year old Sena Morgan’s class is taking a field trip on a large cruise ship from Seattle to Alaska and back. On the second day of the trip, the ship’s propulsion and power fail, along with a serious fire in the engine room. Soon, the people on the cruise ship watch an airliner on fire crash into the ocean. After a while, the head teacher on the field trip, a science teacher, starts telling everyone that there has been an EMP over them and the western seaboard. This is their story.

    I like this self description by the author, “She went to college at Brigham Young University, and now lives with her husband, two children, two dogs and a cat in Houston, TX, where she knows just enough about prepping to prolong her agony if the end ever comes.”. Definitely a me too thing.

    My rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    Amazon rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars (72 reviews)

  8. lynn says:

    From yesterday:


    …power poles…

    Why isn’t this stuff buried? Every road has water and sewage pipes under it – why they don’t simultaneously bury conduits for power, cable, fiber, etc. at the same time? Serious question – it seems to be a standard US thing to leave power lines up on poles, but why? pcb_duffer’s tale illustrates the problem: the whole infrastructure is left vulnerable to storms. Or just falling trees or other accidents…

    Port Lavaca is an old city and burying power lines is a relatively new concept for Texas. We probably get somewhere between a half and a quarter of the hurricanes that Florida gets. The cost for burying power lines is 5X ? 10X ? that of poles and has its own set of hazards (call 811 before you dig, etc). Many of the power poles replaced dated back to the 1950s.

  9. Ray Thompson says:

    Stories like those are why I find paying a tax accountant and enrolled agent to be a bargain

    What? And miss all the fun. Even with a tax accountant there is no guarantee that the IRS will be correct. All you have going for you is the accountant can fight the IRS. Ultimately you are responsible for the taxes, fees, penalties, interest, etc.

    I find for my tax purposes that TurboTax does quite well as my taxes are not that complicated relative to some but more complicated than a lot. I don’t have rental property, work at home, foreign investments, etc. That helps. The biggest hassle for me is when I sell investments and have to report the gains. The reports from the investment company are not that easy to read and understand. Finding the correct numbers is difficult.

    In this case I missed an entire last page. Beyond the screwed up numbers in other investments (the totals are OK for all the investments, just the individual numbers are screwed up), the IRS decided that the investment I failed to report should be taxed at the entire sale amount, not just the gains. Took three letters, the last one quite strong, with highlighting, items numbered, and other such tactics to convince the IRS that only the gains should be taxed. This has been going on since April.

    I finally have a settlement I will accept. I still think the taxes on the non-employee compensation are wrong. But I am not going to argue when the IRS says they owe me $281.00 (minus the interest of $11.00) as opposed to $64.00 I feel is due.

    I feel the tax laws are so complicated even the IRS does not fully understand all the rules. A lot of the findings of the IRS are based on some computer code that is running COBOL on an aging mainframe where the coding was done by some civil servant, probably retired from the Army who spent their last six months in the service cross training to be a programmer. Thinks Hexadecimal is witchcraft and is magic.

    This is the fourth, or is it the fifth, time that I have been accused of being wrong by the IRS. In the previous incidents I was able to prove the IRS incorrect. IRS’s reply was “we agree with your return as filed but reserve the right to change our mind in future audits”. Or the letters addressed to the wrong person saying they are going to sell my house, or letters with incorrect paragraphs added that have no bearing the matter.

    The agency is full of incompetent people, people who will not go to a supervisor for fear of being shown as incompetent. It is easier to just harass people and threaten hoping the people will give in to the threats out of fear. The IRS, or rather the people in the IRS, are vindictive as all get out.

  10. lynn says:

    From yesterday:

    @Lynn: I may have mentioned that my wife and I tried to run a little software company for several years. Sales was always the sticking point. We’re both technical, meaning, we’re both lousy with people, so we needed someone else to handle sales. We weren’t big enough to hire a full-time person, so we talked to small companies and individuals about them working for us on a contract basis. None of them would do so, if the contract was purely performance based. All of them wanted fat provisions, even if they did nothing.

    On the whisky side (weird combo, but we also had a whisky business), we had less of a problem – the business ran well for over 20 years. However, at one point, we thought to expand to other Scottish imports. That side of the business was big enough to hire a sale guy. We discovered that sales people (or this guy, anyway) have zero clue about finances. Just an example: The sales guy was once really proud of himself for selling a couple of cases of beer. So proud that he personally delivered them, driving about 30 miles each way to do so. And he couldn’t understand why we were displeased – he couldn’t grasp that his time, plus mileage, was about a zillion times more than the profit on the beer. We fired him, soon enough…

    Sales and marketing is utterly necessary, but at the same time, it seems to be a swamp of incompetence…

    And I live that with that mantle of incompetence daily. We are in the very very low seven digits of annual sales for the last decade. That is enough to hire and pay a sales person but not enough to hire extreme talent. Or spend a significant amount of money on marketing. Marketing for us is our website and me going to two conferences per year.

    I have hired twelve sales people over the last 23 years (I did not take off my shoes and socks to use my toes for counting so that total may be wrong). I have fired five of them over the years. The others have quit for various reasons, yes, I have been told that I suck and am incompetent.

    Sales and marketing are very indeterminate. That is to say, the old saying that half of your sales and marketing money is wasted, just figuring out which is the bad half is impossible. Run away from anyone who says that they can tell you which half is good.

    Oh yes, I have tried to get international sellers. Most of them do want cash assistance. And you have to watch them like a hawk to make sure that they are not bribing someone (the FCPA is very draconian and I do not want to go to jail).
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Act

    I have advertised on Google. A sweatshop in the Philippines was using VPNs to eat my $100/day advertising budget in the first hour of each day. Friends, that is $3,000/month of wasted money. I figure that it was a hit by one of my competitors. Google advertising refused to believe me so that ended that relationship.

  11. lynn says:

    From yesterday:

    Just old people and they are dying off

    Yeh, well, thank you very much.

    You are welcome ! You will probably outlast me even though you are eight years older.

    I had an afib attack for a couple of hours last night. I am not going to tell my cardiologist. Or maybe it was just extra beats on a fairly regular basis. I don’t want to know.

  12. lynn says:

    RE: IRS
    The problem is their system is complicated even the IRS cannot get everything correct. I have dealt with people in the local IRS office and I think I knew more than the IRS representative. Left the office after they gave me incorrect instructions.

    One of the few good things that my father-in-law did before he became incompetent was to have half of his civil service pension withheld for income taxes. That covered the income taxes on his rental property income. The mandatory IRA distribution has its own withholding. Then he stopped filing a tax return which is actually legal. The IRS will compute your taxes for you if you do not file a return. But they will not return any overage, you must file a return for that. His girl friend found out and got her CPA to file his return for several years. The wife and I have computed his return using Turbo Tax for the last several years.

  13. MrAtoz says:

    …COBOL on an aging mainframe where the coding was done by some civil servant, probably retired from the Army who spent their last six months in the service cross training to be a programmer. Thinks Hexadecimal is witchcraft and is magic.

    Hey! Could be Air Force! Probably Navy.

  14. Greg Norton says:

    Port Lavaca is an old city and burying power lines is a relatively new concept for Texas. We probably get somewhere between a half and a quarter of the hurricanes that Florida gets. The cost for burying power lines is 5X ? 10X ? that of poles and has its own set of hazards (call 811 before you dig, etc). Many of the power poles replaced dated back to the 1950s.

    Florida south of Gainesville is swamp land with an extremely high water table. Until Arthur Rutenberg/US Home started burying utilities in their subdivisions in the 70s, not many builders gave a lot of thought to the issue (or didn’t want the expense) so a lot of houses still have overhead power lines in the older neighborhoods.

    If you’re really unlucky, and your house was built in Orlando during the early boom days of the space program, it isn’t uncommon to find aluminum wiring. “House of the future.”

  15. JimL says:

    On a tangent – burying water & natural gas makes a lot of sense. But repairs involve digging things up and is expensive. (I know from experience).

    Repairing a line in the air is a lot faster & easier, and can usually be done with a crew of one or two.

    I’m just not sold on burying things when you don’t have a compelling reason to. Electricity and light don’t freeze, burst, or do other things that make water & natural gas good candidates to bury.

  16. brad says:

    Aluminum wiring, my parents had a house like that. Corrosion wherevet the aluminum met copper, leading to overheated plugs and switches, what a nightmare…

  17. lynn says:

    And the Brazos river is coming up. But not flood level.
    https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?wfo=HGX&gage=RMOT2

  18. Ray Thompson says:

    I had an afib attack for a couple of hours last night

    You would seem to be an excellent candidate for the Apple Watch 4 when the ECG software is released. Supposed to detect AFIB and provide a sample for the doctor. I got such a device for the fall detection and the AFIB (which I don’t think I have). I suspect more capabilities will be added in the near future.

    Hey! Could be Air Force! Probably Navy.

    Nope. I have seen Army and Navy code. Makes the USAF look like geniuses. In fact the Army and the Navy were using the personnel systems code developed by the USAF. Thus I rest my case (having been one of the 12 that developed the code).

    Then he stopped filing a tax return which is actually legal

    Unless you owe money. I suppose you could guess at what you owe the IRS, send them 150% of that amount and don’t worry about it. However, you will never get your money back unless you file.

    Even if there is a deduction on your return that is in the IRS’ favor, or an obvious missed deduction, the IRS will never catch that and will just ignore the issue. Thus eventually keeping the money. However if you claim that one deduction that was not allowed the IRS will on you hard with interest and possible penalties.

    Repairing a line in the air is a lot faster & easier, and can usually be done with a crew of one or two.

    Along with the problems of underground lines being hit accidentally. May take a couple of days to repair. A transformer blowing up on the ground is exciting, underground it is frightening and very difficult to repair. You also have issues with moisture intrusion. Cost of the cables is much higher. Insulating a 100KVA line is easy on a pole, just air gap. In the ground it is much more difficult and one small gap or hole and the results are not good.

    I would like to see the feeder lines for a neighborhood placed underground and then underground feed to the house. There is the issue of the above ground transformers that no one wants in their yard, the neighbors yard is OK. The distribution lines should all be above ground and the trees cleared away from the lines. But people bitch about the removal of the trees then bitch when a tree falls on a line and complain that the power company should have removed the trees.

    Corrosion wherevet the aluminum met copper

    AL/CU plugs and sockets attempt to solve that issue. Along with a special grease to control the corrosion. Biggest problem with AL is that it expands more than copper and may eventually cause a loose connection. The AL/CU devices control that expansion and contraction. You are also supposed to use a torque screwdriver to avoid over tightening or not tight enough. Best solution is to have the AL removed and replaced with CU everywhere. Expensive but necessary in my opinion.

  19. lynn says:

    Then he stopped filing a tax return which is actually legal

    Unless you owe money. I suppose you could guess at what you owe the IRS, send them 150% of that amount and don’t worry about it. However, you will never get your money back unless you file.

    Since 1/3rd of his income is from rental properties, the IRS only knows what he tells them. And true that they will not return any overage unless you ask for it via a 1040 form.

  20. lynn says:

    I just had a test driver of our software roll his system clock back a week so that he could continue using our software for free. We check our website time and crash the software when that does not match.

    Sigh. It never stops.

    He just crashed three more times. He does not understand causality.

  21. ITguy1998 says:

    Another injury report. Had rotator cuff surgery on the right shoulder yesterday. Was supposed to just be a tendon decompression, but doc found a 2 cm tear that he repaired as well.

    Had a nerve block before the surgery. Makes the complete arm numb. After I woke up from the anesthesia, I had zero pain. Only today has the block started wearing off. I have some pain, but nothing horrible. Doc prescribed hydrocodone. Took first dose a little while go. Dose is one or two pills. I’m taking one. I’m going to top taking it as son as I can.

    Will have to have that arm immobilized for 4 weeks, and I’m already going crazy. Luckily, I can do some work from home – catching up on low priority items on my to do list.

    Also had first pt session today. Did a few pendulum exercises and she stretched my arm out. Was told to do the exercise 3 times a day and to ice the shoulder for 20 minutes every hour. Supposedly doing this gives the best results for reducing pain while healing.

    One minor annoyance is that the wife and I must switch cars, since mine is a stick shift. There are worse problems to deal with in the world, so I will survive. Just hope she doesn’t burn up the clutch…..

  22. Greg Norton says:

    And the Brazos river is coming up. But not flood level.

    Bastrop County is going to get hammered again. Lake Travis is headed towards a historic high level, and gates are open on Colorado dams downstream which have never been opened.

    http://travis.uslakes.info/level.asp

  23. Greg Norton says:

    I just had a test driver of our software roll his system clock back a week so that he could continue using our software for free. We check our website time and crash the software when that does not match.

    I worked the Egghead Software Ponzi during my college years. The business customers were shameless about taking the big box Microsoft Office home, installing, and exercising the liberal return policy. Nothing seems to change.

    Of course, back then, I swear piracy was part of Microsoft’s strategy. I doubt it is yours.

  24. lynn says:

    And the Brazos river is coming up. But not flood level.

    Bastrop County is going to get hammered again. Lake Travis is headed towards a historic high level, and gates are open on Colorado dams downstream which have never been opened.

    http://travis.uslakes.info/level.asp

    Wow, I had no idea. There is incredible video at:
    https://www.kxan.com/news/local-news/video-photos-major-flooding-of-colorado-llano-rivers/1528119350

    and
    https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/16/us/texas-llano-river-flooding/index.html

    So much for the Llano river bridge, that was incredible.

  25. nick flandrey says:

    @ITguy, I had the nerve block for my bicep repair. It was very nice to get over the worst of the pain without any feeling. VERY strange to have the arm move and feel the weight of it, without feeling it moving….

    @lynn, that is tricky with the clock thing. Do the customers know they need an always on internet connection? What happens if they don’t have one? Does the clock start ticking down?

    I do believe MS didn’t really care about individual pirates. They cared a lot about corporate users. They certainly didn’t care if Partners used their “in house” licenses inappropriately.

    n

  26. lynn says:

    @lynn, that is tricky with the clock thing. Do the customers know they need an always on internet connection? What happens if they don’t have one? Does the clock start ticking down?

    Uh, no internet connection is needed, yet. If the person had pulled his internet cable then he would have been ok. Except we might stash clock values in the registry to detect clock turning back without an internet connection.

    We’ve been at this a long time. I’ve seen every trick under the sun. The last one, by Chinese computer programmers IIRC, was to rip the password decryption algorithm out of our software and replace it with their own algorithm. That way they could provide their own passwords. Simply amazing.

  27. lynn says:

    The wife and I went and looked at this house today. It was perfect except for a small problem, it was just two short blocks away from the railroad tracks. We had three trains go by while we were in it. The trains were ok but not when they blew their horn at the close by intersection. The train horn did not shake the house but I would have to put the daughter in the master bedroom and put soundproof windows in it and hope for best .
    https://www.har.com/6102-sunnyside-court/sale_80694716

    My thought was that we would buy this house and build an detached apartment out back for the daughter. Should only take a year or so. The detached garage has a fully finished interior and full bathroom, it just needs air conditioning added to be an awesome man cave. Yes, that is a 12 ft wide by 14 ft tall garage door hiding a 35 ft fifth wheel rv.

  28. Ray Thompson says:

    Bought my lottery tickets. Five sets of numbers for each lottery. If I win you will never hear from me again.

    Yes, the chances of winning are astronomical. The odds are even worse if you don’t have a ticket.

  29. nick flandrey says:

    AR15.com had a thread about what you should do if you won big, written by someone with some legal chops. I’m going to find it and read it first if I win. The advice seemed very good.

    n

    I look at the lottery as the opposite of a risk calculation… the odds are very low, but the result is so massive that you have to consider it. Like spending a nickel to avoid certain death from something very unlikely. Really, for a nickel, you do it…

    n

  30. nick flandrey says:

    @lynn, that house looks a whole lot nicer and has a better layout than some you’ve looked at. Trains are a problem though. I lived a block from a major airport, and you do get used to it…

    n

  31. brad says:

    “We check our website time and crash the software when that does not match.”

    I assume by “crash” you mean “display a message that he needs to pay for the software”? At least, I hope that’s what you mean, else your software just looks unreliable.

    We also had built in a security system, although our software was a much less valuable target than yours. The problem is: with sufficient motivation, a good hacker can always go in and bypass the security. They just have to find the central place (or, possibly, places) where your software tries to do the check, and hard-code an “all ok” result.

    Have you considered moving towards SaaS? That’s the direction we were heading, when we decided to throw in the towel: software-as-a-service, with an optional, locally installed front end. That gives you a lot more control, and by now it’s a pretty widely accepted model. OTOH, it makes your web-server a central point-of-failure for all of your customers, which makes reliability critical – a whole new set of potential headaches. Performance can also be an issue.

    You can also just go one step in that direction: take some central, critical calculation routine and put it on the web-server. Something that the hackers can’t (easily) just replace, so that there is a genuine dependency on the central server.

    Just brain-storming. I’m sure you’ve already considered all of this…

  32. Greg Norton says:

    We’ve been at this a long time. I’ve seen every trick under the sun. The last one, by Chinese computer programmers IIRC, was to rip the password decryption algorithm out of our software and replace it with their own algorithm. That way they could provide their own passwords. Simply amazing.

    Preprocessing of AES keys generates distinct patterns in memory. I’ve seen tools which scan all of the system RAM for the patterns.

    IIRC, a plugin exists for the Volatility framework from Google, shortening the learning curve for scanning memory.

    https://code.google.com/archive/p/volatility/

  33. JimB says:

    SaaS? Oh please. In my former work life, we had systems purposely isolated from the outside world for various good reasons. In my current life, I hate the assumption that everyone has a fast, always-on, connection. I have a slow, sometimes-on connection, and have had problems that should not be.

    Whatever happened to PERSONAL computers?

  34. dkreck says:

    Where’s the revenue? Nothing like a continuing auto renew subscription to keep it coming. Have you noticed MS push for Orifice 365 ?

  35. Nick Flandrey says:

    “Have you noticed MS push for Orifice 365 ?”

    IIRC that came AFTER google started giving it away….

    And thank you NO, I’ll keep my docs local on my machine, behind at least one NAT and firewall… no point in GIVING them to someone who scans every word BY DESIGN.

    n

    (remember the good ole days when people only worried about NSA or CIA reading their mail?)

    add- private industry, proving once again it’s better at something than .gov…… every freaking thing is listening to us now.

  36. MrAtoz says:

    Bought my lottery tickets. Five sets of numbers for each lottery. If I win you will never hear from me again.

    Would you mind sending me your cell just in case. 😉

  37. Nick Flandrey says:

    The answer to the question of “just what the heck are the rats still eating” in the garage was provided today- – – 10 POUNDS of corn meal, and 10 POUNDS of sugar in a 5 gal bucket. Little thieves chewed thru a gamma seal lid and ate the contents of one of my LTS buckets. Did it pretty quickly too, as I didn’t see the hole last week.

    Got one medium sized with a snap trap and peanut butter. must be a new crop that hasn’t learned pb=death.

    Something has chewed the heck out of the bottom of my garage door insulation in just the last two days. I fixed it to finaly fit tight to the ground again and I must have closed off a pathway. Set a trap there, but it was just discharged.

    Little fukcers.

    n

  38. DadCooks (Eric Comben) says:

    Something has chewed the heck out of the bottom of my garage door insulation in just the last two days. I fixed it to finaly fit tight to the ground again and I must have closed off a pathway. Set a trap there, but it was just discharged.

    Little fukcers.

    DemocRats

    We all need a chuckle every now and then.

    Speaking of “chuckle”, how many of you remember Chuckles Candy? They used to be good (as is everything in the good ol’ days), but not so much anymore, too politically correct.

  39. SteveF says:

    Got one medium sized with a snap trap and peanut butter. must be a new crop that hasn’t learned pb=death.

    Train them that peanut butter = food by leaving little dollops on sprung traps. After a week or two (I don’t know how quickly they learn) leave half a dozen armed traps with peanut butter, all on one night.

  40. Nick Flandrey says:

    Now that is a good idea. They don’t touch the pb at all no matter where it is once they learn = death.

    20 POUNDS. I’m wondering how many there were. camera doesn’t show any.

    n

  41. Ray Thompson says:

    Would you mind sending me your cell just in case.

    Wouldn’t matter. If I win I will disappear from everyone I can, especially my money grubbing family.

  42. Ray Thompson says:

    20 POUNDS. I’m wondering how many there were. camera doesn’t show any.

    You could name one Oprah Winfrey and the other Rosey O’Donnell.

  43. Nick Flandrey says:

    I’ve got a cam pointed right at where the hole was, and the motion alarm set to highest sensitivity, and still no pix of the vermin.

    like ghosts.

    n

  44. Ray Thompson says:

    I am still here. Megamillions was a bust.

  45. Nick Flandrey says:

    I bought mmillions, powerball, and tx lotto, one each. Don’t usually buy the $2 tickets. I’ll check them tomorrow.

    Would complicate my life enourmously, but I’ll give it a go if it comes to that.

    n

  46. Ray Thompson says:

    I bought mmillions, powerball, and tx lotto

    I bought MegaMillions and PowerBall, 5 sets of numbers each, $10.00 a ticket for a grand total of $20.00. Don’t mind wasting the money too much as some the money is returned to the education system in TN, so they say. I don’t play the numbers very often as in my opinion too much of the money is going to lottery administrators and staff. I also don’t trust the state to really do what they tell the public. But when the money gets that high I do improve my odds of winning over not having a ticket.

  47. lynn says:

    Bought my lottery tickets. Five sets of numbers for each lottery. If I win you will never hear from me again.

    Would you mind sending me your cell just in case.

    Forget his cell, I want his bank account number.

  48. Miles_Teg says:

    Nick wrote:

    “Trains are a problem though. I lived a block from a major airport, and you do get used to it…”

    I grew up in a house facing on to the Adelaide to Glenelg tram line. After a while we didn’t usually hear the trams even when listening for them.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenelg_tram

  49. live casino directions says:

    Hiya! Quick question that’s completely off topic. Do you know how to make your
    site mobile friendly? My site looks weird when browsing from my iphone4.
    I’m trying to find a template or plugin that might be able
    to fix this issue. If you have any recommendations, please share.
    Appreciate it!

Comments are closed.