67F and soaking wet. Gah, more rain.
Sleep. Hmmm, sleep. Finally got some.
Managed to hit a couple sales. Got a full unopened box of vac seal bags for $4 last week and forgot about it. This week picked up a couple of small items. Prices were high. Did get an ooma phone adapter. Meant to buy one, finally saw one, will try getting vonage switched out… otherwise it was mostly little bits of tech stuff for around the house.
Met with my favorite toy seller, and he says his business hasn’t really slumped. Many others are reporting reduced sales including a big manufacturer from Austria. Orange man is bad for toy sales, like Obomo was good. My friend though is filled with a sense of dread. His customers are buying multiples and cases. His prices are very good, so that may be part of it, but there is also a sense of ‘getting ready for what’s coming’.
What is the trigger? Well, the leftists are working themselves up for something. Suppose that despite all their voter fraud there is a massive RED wave at election time. [engage ad blocker and no script first] If there is a definitive repudiation of lefty candidates, policy, etc. will the Democratic party survive? Will it be the tipping point for the foreign-funded agitators? I think it’s possible.
Don’t slack off. Keep stacking. Tell me what YOU did to prep this week.
n
Whew! I missed it by THAT much…
I forgot to buy lottery tickets yesterday and in a semi-conscious state I came up with the pithiness:
if you buy a lottery ticket the chances of winning are astronomical.
if you don’t buy a lottery ticket the chances of losing are infinite.
Powerball tonight at $470M and next Megamillions $1.6B. Why not? No more than the price of a couple of beers.
the way I look at it, the odds of SOMEONE winning are 100% as they keep playing until someone wins. Might as well put myself in line for that.
n
Some other small sale items this week:
brand new, still with plastic on, small Camelbak bladder and hose. $3 (this is the second one of these, and will complete my set of little camelbak bags for the kids)
Home Cheese Making, by Ricki Carroll. Like new condition. $3
Nikon binos, nice high quality, completely full of moisture. Will need cleaning and complete going thru, $5 (I like cleaning and fixing optics, have all the stuff)
The binos were probably the big score, although the vac bags are the most useful.
n
I buy the vac bags on eBay. It’s been a couple of years so I’m sure the prices have changed.
“Pint 6″ x 12″ Filmtech Food Vacuum Seal Bags (200) -FREE Fast Shipping USA!! $28.80” and “200 Quart 8×12 Universal Vacuum Sealer Bags – Embossed Both Sides Inside! $32.80”.
The seller is “filmtechcorp03”. They also sell rolls, and I have several, but for the price difference, ready made bags are are worth the extra cost just to save wear and tear on my FoodSaver. Your mileage, etc. etc.
@nick
Cheese making is pretty fun and the simple cheeses are remarkably easy. The most difficult part is sourcing milk if you live in a raw milk hostile state.
If you can get your hands on raw unpasteurized milk you will enjoy lots of success.
Some grocery store milks will work, but never the ultra pasteurized. The process destroys the fats ability to form curds.
Your best bet is organic milk that is not ultra pasteurized if you can’t obtain raw.
A fun one is paneer. Heat a gallon or two of milk to a boil. Shut off the heat and immediately dump in juice from a fresh squeezed lemon. Very gently give it a brief stir then leave it be for a bit.
You should get some nice curds in short order, if the milk wasn’t destroyed by the manufacturing and bottling process.
Pour curds and whey thru a clean t-shirt. Twist t-shirt to squeeze out the whey, then sandwich between a couple plates in the fridge with something heavy.
Make palak paneer the next night with your cheese.
Most cheeses don’t want to have the milk heated so hit (80-95 f more typical) and most want culture. Paneer is a cheater cheese that is a quick and tasty way to determine if a particular grocery store milk will work for cheese.
Yummy, easy, tasty.
And if it doesn’t work you’ve at worst wasted $10 in milk and burnt a pot.
I love making cheese. I got as far as a successful cheddar and a terrifying blue I never had the courage to taste. I have a number of pics of my cheese making efforts on my site (I think I linked it in my name). Click on the ‘Cheese’ category. The Rikki Carroll book is kind of the cheese bible, though I used a different book I preferred because it mixed recipes with interviews.
I hope you try it and post your results.
@jenny, thanks for the info. knowing nothing about cheese making except what I saw on the BBC “xxxxx Farms” series, the book looked like a nice, clear, ‘idiots guide’ type of manual. I think we can get raw milk here- there are lots of mexican ‘fresh’ cheesemakers. I love cheese, esp. blue, though I don’t eat as much since I stopped drinking (port wine and stinky cheese, oh my). One of my favorite things is fresh croissants with butter and blue cheese, mopping up the yoke from a fresh fried egg…. with strong coffee as accompaniment.
If I can find the time, or convince my spouse it’s a worthwhile experiment, I’ll def post up the results.
n
On a purely mathematical basis, there is a system with which you can win; however, execution of the system is an operational impossibility as you would have play thousands of lottos.
If there is a definitive repudiation of lefty candidates, policy, etc. will the Democratic party survive? Will it be the tipping point for the foreign-funded agitators? I think it’s possible.
They’ve been repudiated consistently since 2012, but the Progs claw their way back into power with data mining and more attractive candidates.
Heck, I’m amazed that our Republican Congresscritter will hold his seat. He’s the poster child for the problem career politician. Fortunately, for him, something changed in the polls for him a few weeks ago after the Supreme Court ruckus. His opponent suddenly went from “girls stick together” themed commercials touting her military service with “Mr. Blue Sky” playing in the background to ultra-negative attack ads.
I sometimes wonder if Trump knows that the Dems won’t hold the House if they take it back this year with the carpetbagger candidates pledged to put Stretch Pelosi back in the Speaker’s chair before holding a series of impeachment votes. Let the “Blue Wave” happen — sooner or later, the tide will go out, and, as Warren Buffett is fond of saying, we will see who is swimming naked.
But it’s not fair…. /whine
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6298053/Trans-cyclist-defends-championship-win-3rd-place-competitor-complained-NOT-fair.html
Reap what you sow.
n
Or perhaps, “Suck it b!tches.”
But it’s not fair…. /whine
Something weird is definitely going on. If I had to guess, the transwoman failed the psych evals and got her surgery overseas.
My wife had a trans patient in Florida who had to get her surgery done in Canada. She was too far out for the US programs to touch.
Well. Fun stuff.
I dumped my win/temp folder a week or so ago. 80 GB ? Or maybe that was the “server” with 170 GB. Dumped Recycle on both.
Win7 didn’t want to run defrag. No need it says. And when using a quarter of a 2TB drive, why defrag? So.
Ok. Reboot. Win Update has shit to install. I let it do so once in a while…. monthly-ish.
Nice. After “updates” that seem to do nothing, upon re-boot I don’t have a hard drive.
I had to pull the power cord. Everything seems to be fine.
Now what? After backing up mail and such to an external drive, time to shop for a new HD?
Try another reboot cycle…
n
When I worked for my last job I had to add a field to the database that indicated a gender change. Out of 400K+ people in the DB there were almost 100 with a gender change that had reported it to the organization. There may have been more that had not indicated the change to the organization.
Time to shop for a SSD. The performance boost is well worth the cost, such cost being under $100.00 for 0.5 TB. But get a 1 TB drive for about $140.00.
If it’s the hard drive there is usually some warning. More likely it’s the drive controller esp if it’s aging. Lotta bad caps still out there.
That’s what killed my RAID, I lost the controller, and it ate the disks while failing and flailing.
n
Gee it’s been a WHOLE WEEK–
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6298337/Florida-feeling-aftermath-Hurricane-Michael-one-week-on.html
“Florida Panhandle still reeling from the devastating effects of Hurricane Michael one week on, as more than 100,000 homes and businesses are still without power”
WTF people? A WEEK. Write an article after 3 months. Or a year. NO idea of the enormity of the situation, despite the clear pictures in front of their faces.
jeez.
n
WTF people? A WEEK. Write an article after 3 months. Or a year. NO idea of the enormity of the situation, despite the clear pictures in front of their faces.
Panama City is still a remote area of the state, and the population is spread out over a wide area. The Panhandle has more in common with Alabama and Georgia than Miami.
The FEMA trailers were still at the airport in Punta Gorda nearly a year after Charlie, and that area has I75 and US 41 providing access.
I do think Florida will reconsider the anti-gouging laws. Those were hastily passed and signed by RINO Gov. Charlie Crist as part of his Senate seat grab.
When I worked for my last job I had to add a field to the database that indicated a gender change. Out of 400K+ people in the DB there were almost 100 with a gender change that had reported it to the organization. There may have been more that had not indicated the change to the organization.
IBM pays for the gender reassignment ever since they ran off Lynn Conway in the 60s and subsequently missed out on owning a piece of Conway-Mead VLSI. That may have been one of the worst decisions Armonk ever made, possibly worse than the deal for DOS with Microsoft.
I don’t know anyone who studied EE in the 80s who didn’t see the Conway-Mead VLSI textbook at some point.
_Sabotage (Powerless Nation) (Volume 3)_ by Ellisa Barr
https://www.amazon.com/Ellisa-Barr/e/B00JUBTWA4/?tag=ttgnet-20
Book number three of a three book EMP apocalypse series. I read the well printed and bound POD (print on demand) trade paperback.
A strongman shows up with a small military force and forcibly recruits all of the young adults and kids for his army from the town. Several of the kids resist.
The EMP in this series is a little less drastic than most. If the car engine or other computer device was off at the time of the EMP then the computer was not destroyed and the car / device could be started and driven. My theory is that the computer will be scrambled but a simple hard reboot will restart the computer into normal operation.
My rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars (42 reviews)
There really is no difference between buying a ticket (or 1000) versus buying none, if you think about the odds of winning. People have a hard time with big numbers so they waste money on lottery tickets.
I don’t know if any of these are absolutely true, but they show the scale of the numbers: You have a better chance of getting killed in a car accident on the trip to buy the ticket than buying a winner. You have a better chance of getting killed by a polar bear and a grizzly bear at the same time… etc…
The EMP in this series is a little less drastic than most. If the car engine or other computer device was off at the time of the EMP then the computer was not destroyed and the car / device could be started and driven. My theory is that the computer will be scrambled but a simple hard reboot will restart the computer into normal operation.
We’ll never know for sure until an EMP actually happens.
Most vehicles older than ~2001, more likely to survive an EMP, are about to be wiped from daily driver use thanks to Trump’s executive order authorizing E15. Gotta make the corn farmers happy ahead of the midterms.
And yet there were two different stories about bear attacks last week. People do get attacked by bears. And they win the lotto. Like I said, there is a 100% chance SOMEONE will win, because they keep playing until someone does. No telling WHO that someone is, but SOMEONE with a ticket will win. A person WITHOUT a ticket CAN NOT win. So no matter how long the odds are, the two are not equivalent. Essentially the same and ACTUALLY the same are not the same 🙂
I forgot to get a ticket yesterday. My chances of winning were in fact O.
n
Like I said, there is a 100% chance SOMEONE will win, because they keep playing until someone does.
Just like Bingo, God’s game.
Played most often in God’s own waiting room…..
n
Most vehicles older than ~2001, more likely to survive an EMP, are about to be wiped from daily driver use thanks to Trump’s executive order authorizing E15. Gotta make the corn farmers happy ahead of the midterms.
E15 is stupid. So is E10, E9, E8, E7, E6, E5, E4, E3, E2, and E1. Ethanol and E0 (real gasoline) separate quickly (a month or so) and can cause real problems.
E15 is stupid. So is E10, E9, E8, E7, E6, E5, E4, E3, E2, and E1. Ethanol and E0 (real gasoline) separate quickly (a month or so) and can cause real problems.
Dunno what to think about Trump on that one. He stayed the 54 MPG mandate. Ford’s even exploring putting the Crown Vic back into production as a 2020 model for the cops and, possibly, civilians after the Taurus goes away.
E15 is stupid. So is E10, E9, E8, E7, E6, E5, E4, E3, E2, and E1. Ethanol and E0 (real gasoline) separate quickly (a month or so) and can cause real problems.
Dunno what to think about Trump on that one. He stayed the 54 MPG mandate. Ford’s even exploring putting the Crown Vic back into production as a 2020 model for the cops and, possibly, civilians after the Taurus goes away.
Trump is playing the corn game. He is running for 2020, he just has not announced yet. When he announces, that triggers legal requirements so he won’t do it until he has to.
And police departments love their special Chevy Tahoe cut down SUV. I don’t see them going back to a sedan.
Can’t chase someone in the Tahoe. It specifically says on the suv’s that they are not pursuit vehicles.
n
And police departments love their special Chevy Tahoe cut down SUV. I don’t see them going back to a sedan.
While it wasn’t optimal maintenance, a Crown Vic could easily go 400,000 miles just by changing the oil regularly … and “regularly” could be stretched to way behond 3000 miles. The SUVs and Chrysler sedans are fussier and more expensive.
I don’t see a revival happening unless Ford magically preserved the production line from 2011 intact (doubtful … but the tooling could be stashed somewhere) or agreed to eat the maintenance costs on the newer tech which still has lingering longevity questions.
Can’t chase someone in the Tahoe. It specifically says on the suv’s that they are not pursuit vehicles.
That’s the other issue. Plus, the SUV is much harder to hide for speed traps/DUI enforcement, and it seems like everyone has Waze in tech areas like Austin. “Police reported ahead” is generally accurate.
Watching the APD on occasion, I have my doubts about their ability to see out of the Exploders. We’ve never solved that issue with my wife.
You can’t see out of the Charger at all (other than forward.) During my class we drove the EVOC course, and the backing up part was entirely blind, and done ‘on faith’. The instructor says “reverse, hard right, brakes, forward, go!” and the cones are set to match the turn of the vehicle. The stack of radios and laptop (MDU) limits vision to the right, and many of the vehicles have flashing lights installed INSIDE which further occlude vision. My expedition has great sightlines.
n