64F and slightly less than saturated in Houston this AM. Yesterday was beautiful in the afternoon. Very few spring-like days left, so I’m very happy to get one.
I’d like to thank and commend Rick for his efforts keeping this place up and running well. I’m not suited by education, experience or temperament to do so, and he’s been a trooper.
I’m falling asleep in my chair, so I better get up and start the day…
n
Subbing again today. Art teacher. Fourth time in a row she has needed a sub. Wife did it yesterday. Supposedly she has strep throat so probably out the rest of the week. If she needs a sub tomorrow the wife will handle that day and I will take Friday.
Freshmen this year are more annoying than usual. Bunch of sneaky, disrespective, little snots. Apparently raised that way by their parents, probably a single mother struggling to make ends meet and rarely home. Of course they think their little darlings are perfect.
Most annoying are the girls, some of them thinking that without them the world would cease to exist.
It seems the attachment to cell phones is stronger this year with the freshmen than it has ever been in the past. Many would rather loose an appendage, as long such loss did not affect their texting, than have to give up a cell phone permanently. Many are sneaky using their cell phones but I am getting at finding the abusers.
Robotics teacher just came in and needs a sub so wife will take art class and I will take the robotics class. I like that class better.
Just loading the page. Errors are still happening.
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@ttgnet.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Took the wife to the Methodist Transplant Clinic yesterday to discuss options. She was VERY apprehensive. She doesn’t want another surgery, had 17 so far, and she has a creepy feeling about walking around with someone else body part in her. The staff at Methodist were fantastic. We had a long discussion with the old grizzled transplant surgeon and his assistant, a young, VERY attractive blond who might have come from central casting. They explained the rules and process for kidney transplants and made my wife much more comfortable. Before she can go on the active transplant list she has to be on dialysis for at least 3 months and show no improvement. Insurance companies don’t want to pay for expensive transplants when dialysis will keep you alive too. Next week they will implant the shunt next week. She was concerned that it would impact our trip to Italy but the process in completely in-patient and takes about an hour and healing shouldn’t interfere with our travel they say. So we are still good to go.
Last weekend the garage door spring went BANG!!. I called a local repair guy I found on the Neighborhood web site. I told him the garage door went BANG and he said “Spring”. “Yeah”, I replied. He said springs last about 10 years which was news to me. He told me he does spring replacements almost every day. He came by Monday and replaced the spring, greased the door tracks, lubed the chain and was gone in 30 minutes. I was happy to pay $140 cash for the service.
My garage door opener is running, but won’t lift the door. The door is balanced, the sensors clear, but the motor only lifts it 1 inch before stopping. No time to chase it, and no good access to the motor, so I pulled the release handle and lift the door manually. Been doing that for a couple of months…..
n
Although they recently changed their policy on ad blockers and I’m now loathe to send them views,
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/04/border-patrol-official-drops-shocking-statistic-on-nationalities-of-illegals-crossing-border/
Do the math on the daily totals and then extend it back in time…. almost none show up for court, which means all those released stay here illegally. And these are just the ones caught. While Border Patrol is processing those 1000, it’s reasonable to assume just as many or more come across unhindered.
n
Insurance companies don’t want to pay for anything. I get it they are in business to make money and not lose money. But the excuses the insurance companies use to not pay are really bizarre.
In my wife’s case they sent her to therapy for two months costing me several hundred dollars. The benefit to the insurance company was the delay put me across a year boundary and a new set of deductibles. I was really close to satisfying my deductible for the year thus insurance company found a way to avoid that boundary. She had to deal with another two months of pain and extreme discomfort for no gain.
nick: RE: Garage doors
Last month my garage door began to “act up”. It would go up about half way then pause and go back down. It was intermittent so I didn’t bother to investigate. Till the day it completely refused to open no matter how often I punched the button. (Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome is a sign of stupidity) So I finally looked into the issue. I found that one hinge-roller bracket had literally broken in two on each side of the door. I ran down to Home Depot to get replacement hinges. There I discovered that there are several types of hinge-roller combinations , each with differing angles. So back home to pull the broken originals off, I should have done this in the first place, to use as examples. The replacement took about 5 minutes and everything went smoothly till the spring incident.
My garage openers flash a code to tell you why it reversed. Have you at least checked the obstacle sensors to see if the receiver side has a light indicating it’s receiving the beam?
BTW Rick. Sever error when posting. Reload fixed.
My garage door opener is running, but won’t lift the door. The door is balanced, the sensors clear, but the motor only lifts it 1 inch before stopping. No time to chase it, and no good access to the motor, so I pulled the release handle and lift the door manually. Been doing that for a couple of months…..
Our garage door in the WA State rental had a track alignment problem stemming from when the landlord ran into the track with her car when she lived in the house full time.
Techs came out to adjust the track twice to no avail. One tech indicated that only a complete replacement would make it work properly, but our landlord was too cheap and didn’t want to admit she did something wrong.
I’ve said this before, but it is worth repeating — never rent a divorced woman’s alimony settlement house. It was HER house and she was going to do things HER way without any male person countering HER decisions.
My last garage door opener stopped lifting the door. The motor was running but no lift. Turns out the chain had jumped the sprocket. I was able after much effort get the chain back on the sprocket. Lifted once and chain was once again off the sprocket. Turns out the drive sprocket was worn. Not replaceable unless the entire motor drive assembly was replaced. As much as a new opener.
So I called a company to replace the opener. I should have done it myself based on what I saw for installation. But garage doors and springs have always been one of those things that I avoid. A lot of energy in coil springs that are wrapped around the shaft providing the lift assist. One wrong move and my road rage digit could be missing. $450.00 for the opener installed. Lifetime warranty on the belt.
New opener is belt drive, web enabled, etc. Belt drive is really quiet, much much quieter than the chain drive. App on the phone knows my location and will open the garage as I start to drive down the street. I disabled that feature as the vehicles have built-in remotes and that is a better option in my opinion.
Motor is a DC motor thus the speed varies. Close to fully open or closed position the motor slows down the movement. Adjustment for closed position is done by jogging the motor, no sensors on the track. Same for fully open. Battery backup so the unit will still work in case of a power outage. Quite a nice unit.
So explain to me how that is much different than being married.
“It was HER house and she was going to do things HER way without any male person countering HER decisions.”
So explain to me how that is much different than being married.
No sensible male would install closet hardware without the included drywall anchors. And the dark brown paint scheme in the living room which ate all ambient light would have been redone … eventually … by the male in the house without any admission of female wrongdoing on color selection.
Bank VP for a small chain in Portland — that just compounded the arrogance.
I fixed a bunch of issues out of my own pocket, and she thanked me by keeping half of my $1500 deposit in addition to the $700 advance cleaning fee over minor wear and tear.
I’ve got a question for those of you using gmail. I am up against an almost full (14.8 GB) gmail store. Over the past several months I have been deleting old mails, but it is difficult as there are receipts/orders/attachments from many sources that also send me incessant sales emails. So I was looking to perhaps download most everything I have from gmail to a local mail client. But I would also like to keep the new emails online and available (as well as maybe 2 – 3 years of the old stuff).
Has anyone done anything like this and which email client for Windows 10 would you recommend?
Google, of course, is offering to sell me more storage, but that is not what I want to do.
dkreck : Re Garage Door
The first thing I did was check the sensors because we have issue with them getting blocked before. And with small animals running through the beam as we closed the door. It was only after I ensured the sensors were working that I disconnected the door from the lifter motor and ran it up and down by hand. There was an obvious spot in it’s travel where it was binding, creating a greater load on the motor. Examining the track I saw the broken hinge brackets on one side. Luckily I examined BOTH sides because the hinge was cracked on the other side as well. Usually I am too lazy to keep looking after I had found the obvious problem.
RE:never rent a divorced woman’s alimony settlement house
We once rented a house that was part of a contested divorce settlement. We were renting from the ex-wife. After about 6 months the ex-husband shows up and tells us to vacate HIS house or he will bring the sheriff. We called our landlord (the ex-wife) who said he had no claim and to ignore him. We did. Then the sheriff arrived ready to evict us. We showed him the lease agreement and proof of rental payment and he backed off telling the ex-husband he would have to get this settled in court. We moved before anything else happened.
True. What I meant was my wife will ask me a question about color or other item about the house. Ask what I think is a good color. I choose then am told that is a stupid choice. Thus I just give up and let her do what she wants.
BC: the great volcano
https://www.gocomics.com/bc/2019/04/10
Yup, the beginning of gloom and doom reporting.
@IT_Pro, I use Thunderbird to do what you want to do. I use POP instead of IMAP and retrieve all my emails into a single Inbox in Thunderbird, where I can easily read, sort, and archive without losing what Gmail has in the “cloud”. I periodically go into Gmail to erase email more than a few months old. In the past, I have used “filters” to “sort” my incoming email, but I now prefer the hands-on approach so I don’t forget to look in all my folders/sub-folders (which are extensive).
I’ve been doing this forever, essentially since Gmail originated.
@Rick – posting failed repeated times with “500 Server Error”. IMHO, your “provider” needs to replace a server.
“SpaceX Plans First-Ever Commercial Falcon Heavy Launch Tonight”
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/289295-spacex-plans-first-ever-commercial-falcon-heavy-launch-tonight
Wow, 27 rocket engines if I counted right ! I would like to see this go up.
Temps are in the upper 30s and cloudy today, with a high around 43º. I expect to remain relatively dry today.
I drove to work today as it’s just a little chillier than I like to bike. Yesterday was at the lower limit. Shorts & windshirt, along with a reflective vest, blinky red taillight, and a bright LED headlight make me visible to drivers. I still pay attention when I come to cross streets, however, as I am not always seen.
When I put the belt tensioner on the truck yesterday, I cursed the engineers who designed it such that the tensioner has to be removed to install the belt, even though you do NOT have to put it over the fan due to the way they have the pulleys arranged. Today I am marveling at the brilliant decision. Why is that? Because the design is such that a failure of the tensioner prevents the belt from falling off and entangling other things. Further, it kept enough tension on the belt to allow me to drive home, keeping the water pump, alternator, and power steering functional.
It only took about 45 minutes to put the silly thing together, take it apart, and put it together last night in the failing light. Works great today.
@DadCooks
I set up Thunderbird quite a few years ago for my wife’s AT&T and Verizon accounts. It has worked well for her. Thunderbird is configured to download everything constantly, so the disadvantage is that when we are away, she does not have access to her older email.
Based on your experience, Thunderbird should work for me. I will elect to keep email on the server and just delete older email so that I have it available when I travel.
I have been reading about other email clients (such as eM, but they seem to have limitations in their free versions or do not handle Gmail (such as Hiri).
Since I have to support Thunderbird anyway for my wife, I should probably use it as well. It also falls into the “just works” category, which is always welcome.
IT_Pro: I do about the same as DadCooks, except that I seldom delete messages from the gmail account. (My usage is nowhere near the limit on any of my accounts so there’s no need.)
Another advantage of pulling everything down is that you can more conveniently look for the biggest messages, typically those with big attachments. You can target those for deletion and free up more online space for the same amount of work. You can also sort by, say, sender and see that you have 3000 messages from one company because they’ve been sending twice-daily sales pitches for the past five years.
Hah! I posted that above a long time ago, but it hung on a 500 error, and I just noticed.
In other nooz – the Swiss will vote again.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47879777
One suspects that they will keep voting until they get it right.
{/snark}
The ‘Continuing Saga of 500’
A quick look at the access logs shows activity from some searchbots that are quite persistent. So last night added commands to the htaccess file to block those user-agents. Did another tweak just now.
The htaccess file now has these directives:
SetEnvIfNoCase User-agent (yandex|baidu|MJ12bot|AhrefsBot) not-allowed=1
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from ALL
Deny from env=not-allowed
The ‘MJ12bot’ was showing up a lot yesterday, and the ‘AhrefsBot’ is another leading contender today. So the above should block those.
Still some 500 errors this morning, again, quite intermittent. A reload usually fixes it.
Will be contacting the DreamHost support guys again today to see what they say.
My garage door opener is running, but won’t lift the door. The door is balanced, the sensors clear, but the motor only lifts it 1 inch before stopping. No time to chase it, and no good access to the motor, so I pulled the release handle and lift the door manually. Been doing that for a couple of months…..
I replaced my garage door opener last year. The old garage door opened had a rubber belt with 4 metal wires in it. The rubber belt stripped off. The new garage door opener is a Genie with a screw drive from Home Depot.
Took the wife to the Methodist Transplant Clinic yesterday to discuss options. She was VERY apprehensive. She doesn’t want another surgery, had 17 so far, and she has a creepy feeling about walking around with someone else body part in her.
17 is a lot of surgeries. Makes my three surgeries look trivial. I don’t blame her, that is a lot of healing.
My mother is having surgery today to remove the football sized hematoma today at the hip implant site. Maybe to adjust the length of the hip implant. And hopefully she will be able to walk starting tomorrow. Hopefully. And no horrendous pain.
@lynn
My prayers are with your mother for a successful surgery and recovery. Something did not go quite right, and the surgeon should be able to make it right.
As I indicated in an earlier post, my wife had her right hip replaced a short time ago (now almost 8 weeks). She still has some “strange” feelings and will have her last physical therapy session this Friday. In our case, everything went smoothly and my wife has been walking around well with it. Hopefully, after your Mom’s surgery, everything will be much better for her as well.
@SteveF
I have had my Gmail account since 2004, and it has grown quite a bit. In the beginning, Google said that there was never a need to delete any email, so I mostly followed that, except deleting the most useless and annoying emails. But 15 years later, I am now almost filling the available space, so I want to bring down everything and delete most of the older emails. After that, I will begin to do purges every 2 or 3 months, as it fills up again. Very good point about being able to sort/search by size/attachments etc. Right now the problem is that I might have 3000 emails from, say Newegg, and I want to delete all except for invoices or order confirmations. I have not found an easy way to do this in Gmail.
lynn: surgery is nothing to sneeze at so best wishes for your mom
While I have had no surgeries, my wife has had more than both our shares.
– Resurfacing surgery on both knees.
– Hysterectomy
– Appendix
– carpal tunnel (both wrists)
– Surgery on one shoulder
– Removal of lumps in one hand
– Gall bladder removed
– Triple Bypass followed by two more surgeries to eliminate the VRE infection from the original. They had to take her entire sternum and parts of 3 ribs to be sure they got it all.
– three stints installed after various heart attacks
– and various others … sigh
I have received the following SERVER ERROR three times today.
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@ttgnet.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
@IT_Pro
Regarding filtering in Gmail: have you tried doing searches in the Gmail search bar?
You do a first search for ‘Newegg’, then filter that by adding a ‘-invoice’ (to exclude the word ‘invoice’) and adding (subtracting?) from the search in a similar way to get the list down to the minimum. That should get you a shorter list.
Then delete selectively.
Another technique is to add labels to emails from ‘Newegg’, like a label called ‘Newegg-keep’. Then you can filter for any “Newegg” email that doesn’t have that label (I think you would add ‘-label:Newegg-keep’ or similar.)
And here’s hoping that the 500’s are gone… (knock on head).
@Harold
Still trying to get rid of the 500’s. I think it is better since my last post on that (13:23 local server time; see comment above).
No need to quote the entire message, BTW. It doesn’t have any information that is helpful. (500 messages are like that…very generic, and not helpful as to the real cause)
I set up Thunderbird quite a few years ago for my wife’s AT&T and Verizon accounts. It has worked well for her. Thunderbird is configured to download everything constantly, so the disadvantage is that when we are away, she does not have access to her older email.
I use Thunderbird and Gmail also for both corporate and private email using POP. We have our main domain record hosted at Gmail. Works awesomely.
Unless you clear trash at Gmail, you do have the last 30 days of emails you received in your trash folder. Come in handy on the road occasionally. Plus you have all of your sent email forever.
I have about 40 GB of email in my corporate profile on Thunderbird. Works very well and no corruptions in the last 10+ years for me. A couple of my employees have had their email corrupted due to hardware issues though. The Tbird developers are slowly planning to move from the mailbox email storage to maildir email storage which should cut back corruption and writing those huge mbx files all the time.
Wow, 27 rocket engines if I counted right ! I would like to see this go up.
SpaceX generally has an after hours event at the KSC visitor center for launches, but the old Apollo/Shuttle viewing sites on the Cocoa Beach causeway are just as valid now as they were 50 years ago since Falcon launches from Complex 39.
Don’t go out there expecting anything spectacular from Cocoa Beach. The place has gone downhill as a tourist spot since the early 90s. The ending of Shuttle wasn’t as much of a factor as Disney aggressively corralling tourists on their property.
Instead of helping my wife with school, my father-in-law financed a rub-n-tug day spa out in Cocoa Beach in the late 90s. It is another FL town where those places go unnoticed.
“ATSC 3.0 to be Deployed in 40 U.S. Markets by End of 2020”
https://www.tvtechnology.com/atsc3/atsc-3-0-to-be-deployed-in-40-u-s-markets-by-end-of-year
I am not sure what is going on here. One wonders if the tv broadcasters are trying to get some command and control back.
“The Linux desktop is in trouble”
https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-linux-desktop-is-in-trouble/
When has it not been in trouble ?
Confucius say: “What go up, must come down.”
Sort of like the Microsoft message “Incorrect DLL Loaded.” with no mention of the DLL in question. Why is it so difficult for programmers to include more information in the message? It would seem like it would be helpful in their efforts to debug code.
Not to be an ass, keep trying. I applaud and appreciate your efforts and understand the frustration. I just got another error message. This is informational only, not critical critique.
Confucius was never never conceived of Voyager I. It went up and will not be coming down. Except perhaps on some planet a billion trillion years from now. But in space what is really up or down?
Wow, 27 rocket engines if I counted right ! I would like to see this go up.
Confucius say: “What go up, must come down.”
I would like to see it come down also. From a very safe distance though. And I understand that it will be landing on the barge.
Reminds me of the old (1980’s era) IBM mainframe error codes that when you looked them up in the HUGE OS/VS1 Manual the description was “This error should never occur” WELL NO SHIT !! How useful is that?
I am not sure what is going on here. One wonders if the tv broadcasters are trying to get some command and control back.
ATSC 3.0 is two-way IIRC.
It will not be backwards compatible the last time I looked. Forced obsolecence.
500 messages are like that…very generic, and not helpful as to the real cause
I remember that the last time this came up, it had to do with cruft which had built up in the database related to editing of posts.
I am not sure what is going on here. One wonders if the tv broadcasters are trying to get some command and control back.
ATSC 3.0 is two-way IIRC.
It will not be backwards compatible the last time I looked. Forced obsolecence.
Yeah, I saw the “targeted advertising” in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATSC_3.0
and wondered how that will work.
When has it not been in trouble ?
Kids today. They never had to hand populate the horizontal and vertical refresh for X Windows from the monitor manual spec page. And if you got it wrong, your monitor could break or even burst into flame. In my day …
Sad to hear Linux Mint might be going the way of the other Linux desktop attempts.
I’m currently testing Pop! OS from System76 on my last Windows 7 laptop, my old MacBook Pro, which isn’t good for running any commercial operating system reliably since Apple discontinued support and Microsoft started patching Win 7 for the speculative execution security holes. So far so good, but the Nvidia proprietary drivers don’t work — big surprise on Linux.
Pop! OS is probably as close as anyone has come to a Linux desktop for anyone to use, but it is still mainly for techies. Very promising, however.
The biggest problem with the desktop scene is that most Linux developers are not big GUI people, starting with the benevolent dictator himself.
If you’re thinking about a Linux port of your product line, Qt is the most popular cross-platform GUI library with Windows, Mac, and Linux support. Though, I would suggest starting on the cheap by having the intern make the existing Win32 GUI product run under Wine on CentOS 6/7.
Socket code *mostly* works the same on Windows and Linux, but there are gotchas, particularly with select(). On the upside, a socket close is close() not closesocket().
“ATSC 3.0 to be Deployed in 40 U.S. Markets by End of 2020”
I clicked a few links there.
“The Phoenix Model Market is not only testing the technology but also working with industry research firm Magid to analyze consumer interest in the standard, which combines traditional over the air broadcasting with IP.”
and
“Consumers find most value in the combination of features. The combination of Enhanced Video – 4K video with High Dynamic Range – and Immersive 3D Audio have the broadest appeal,”
Actually. No. Not interested. 1080i is pretty good, 1080p from the Blu-ray is a bit better. 4K video and Dolby 7.2 whatever surround sound? For what? What is on TV that is worth the bandwidth? Other than some NatGeo stuff with African wildlife? Commercials? Lawyer commercials in 4K? No no no an thousand times no. What the hell are you people smoking or shooting up?
“combines traditional over the air broadcasting with IP” is charming. They plan to use my LAN and the Internet access I pay for to track what I watch so they can give me custom commercials. Sweet. I’ll block that nonsense at my firewall.
I found my “blue grease”, it’s high temp wheel bearing grease. Good enough.
Funny thing, my Murry riding mower had grease fittings. On the front wheels anyway. This MTD labeled as made by Tractor Supply does not.
@greg norton
“Database cruft” – did a cleanup of that yesterday. And another today (just now), along with an optimize. (Using “Advanced Database Cleaner” plugin, for those that are interested.
We shall see if that fixes things…
@Rick,
Have you checked for SYN_Received attacks? My company server is always battling DoS attacks from Asia, Eastern Europe that are basically SYN floods that tie up the server and cause timeouts.
Its a game of whack a mole when it happens tho. Banning offending IP blocks is the only cure we have found. Crude, but sometimes you have to kill an ant with a flamethrower.
I also use Thunderbird for Gmail. IMAP however. Moving anything to a ‘local folder’ places it on your computer not the Gmail server. Also in TB settings for POP accounts you can specify how long to leave mail on the server. I use thirty days.
Lastly I also use Chrome Remote Desktop and can just log on to my home desktop (and a few others at work). Must Have C RDP on both computers and use Chrome. Locked to your Google account so I only use on computers I have a locked account on.
@AlexG
This site is on a hosted (and shared) server. Don’t have access to command line to check any of that. Hosting support hasn’t mentioned anything.
I have noticed (as previously mentioned) that there are a couple of search-bots going through every post on the site, and not very ‘politely’ (not spreading out their requests). Thus the blocking via htaccess was added, as mentioned above.
Gee – I sure hope my RSS client isn’t a part of that mix. It updates every 10 minutes, and I’ve been using it since Firefox dropped support for RSS menus.
IRIC, Yandex is Russia’s Google. That is, it’s their most popular search engine. I’ve used it on rare occasion when I think Google is suppressing something.
Not to exclude anyone who honestly wants to consume and contribute to this site, but I think it’d be prudent to block ALL traffic to ttgnet.com that originates in Asia, Middle East, Africa, or South America.
@JimL
I do see (in the access logs) some traffic from RSS readers, but it seems more polite than the user-agents that are blocked by the new htaccess rule. So your RSS reader shouldn’t be affected.
@Chad
Re blocking global areas: maybe, but Google Analytics shows that all visitors here are from US (and Alaska – Hi Jenny!). So that is not a problem here. (All analytics are done server-side, so visitors with ad-blocking will be ‘counted’.)
E-mail….
I use t-bird for POP. The phones and Kindles do IMAP.
I can check the mail on my PC and I have a copy right here. But it’s still on the server until I delete it locally.
I can check mail on the phone and still see the mail I have downloaded. I can delete it from the server but it’s still on my PC.
It’s a mess but it works for me.
Adblock Plus says it is blocking nothing here.
I use Thunderbird as a RSS reader. I normally don’t pay any attention to this site but it has been subscribed. Just looked. No entries since 3/20/19. Old system I keep has all up to date.
Must check.
@Paul
That’s because Google Analytics code is being done on the server side, not at the client level (with JavaScript). Since analytics are done server-side, your client (and your ad-blocker) won’t know that the GA code is being run.
Most ad-blockers will block the GA JS files. Which is why I run the GA code on the server, rather than on the client.
I’m not the only one that does this. Most sites will add the GA JS code to the page, and then won’t get accurate analytics data. (And the privacy page here notes that server-side analytics.)
If you look at the generated code for any page here, you won’t find the GA code anywhere.
Had my ham radio lunch. Starting to feel like part of the group…
Picked the kids up and am at the YMCA for volleyball practice.
Then home fore dinner
I wrote a big rant about non conus access, I deleted
Rick, no, you are wrong, AFAIK is Rumania, Switzerland, myself
Chad, no further comments,
PS Rick we all appreciate your job here
Best
“Database cruft” – did a cleanup of that yesterday. And another today (just now), along with an optimize. (Using “Advanced Database Cleaner” plugin, for those that are interested.
We shall see if that fixes things…
Sorry I can’t be more help. I’ve been meaning to try WordPress admin.
@ajy
Now that you mention that, there should be additional users shown in non-US areas in Google Analytics. Not sure why they are not being reported. The server-side GA code that I am using (my own GDPR plugin) is supposed to grab the geo-code, but now that I look more closely at the code, I am not getting the geo information. (Obviously, since it’s not shown.)
I’ve done the server-side geo ‘grab’ on my other sites, so I guess that I need to fix the plugin.
Thanks for the nudge.
I am aware, however, of the privacy stuff (like GDPR) needed for a site (like this one) that is used by EU users. So, even though we use a cookie here (mostly for keeping track of your user info for when you comment), we also track visits for analytics purposes. No other personal info (other than the info that you enter when you comment) is stored in any database. So I think that the site is GDPR compliant.
I’d be interested in any concerns you have, though. I can take ‘rants’ … I’ve raised teenagers. And I use FaceBook.
Six months to the day since the hurricane, and the community is still literally picking up the pieces. The smaller cities and more rural parts of the county still haven’t finished picking up debris. Right now the best estimate is ~ 15,000,000 cubic yards picked up, and $6,000,000,000+ in insured losses. The uninsured ones are anyone’s guess. The school board says they are on the hook for at least $250,000,000 in losses beyond the coverage they had, the county has borrowed $100,000,000 so far. In this county, the one directly to our east, and the one just north of that, it’s guessed that at least 300,000 acres of pine timberland are completely destroyed. The state Forestry Department more or less admits that it’s all going to burn, and that it will likely get away from them, and says that the burn danger will last up to 10 years. There are no reliable estimates as to the number of destroyed commercial buildings, homes, condos, & apartments. Neither are there valid estimates on the number of people who’ve been forced to leave, either for lack of a job or the lack of a place to live, one or the other having been destroyed by the storm.
Prepping lesson: This was a tropical depression on Monday, on Wednesday when it hit the winds were 150 mph or greater (all the instrumentation, even on the AFB, failed). If you have some warning, GTFO!!! And either way be prepared to revert to an 1820’s lifestyle. No utilities, no communications, no way to prepare food, little to no transportation. Don’t live or die with the fortunes of a ‘smart’ phone, and don’t rely on one supplier for anything. It seems that most of the governmental agencies around here were tied to Brand V cellular, and when that system went down hard they had no backup. Mostly, being somewhere else is the preferred option. I was 150 miles away, in perfect safety. A lady with whom I would have liked to been involved stayed. She, her two sons, the dog, & the cat were in a small apartment, with no power, water, or sewer, blown out windows, no telecom, no gasoline, etc. I offered them shelter, first in Mobile and then in my home, but she refused.
thanks for the update, how are you dealing with those issues day to day?
n
Stupid students. I tell them when class starts if I see a cellphone it will be taken to the office where the student’s parents must retrieve the phone on the first offense. Second offense is alternative school where parents must check the student in and out with no bus service. Really messes with parents that are both working.
Anyway, subbing today I was to show a video. While the video was showing I walked around and got a girl watching a video on her phone. She tried to hide it but it was too late as I had watched her for 10 seconds without her knowing. Got to love those quiet shoes. So I took her phone.
Later she asks me when she can get her phone back. That riled me as she knew better to use the phone. I was going let her have the phone back at the end of the day but not after being approached in class asking for the phone. Nope, took it too the office. She begged me to not take the phone to the office as it is her second offence. Too bad.
What part of “don’t use your phone because if I see it I will take it” do they not understand? Do they think I am clueless? Or is the urge to use the phone just overwhelming their brains and their sense of what is right or wrong? Regardless, I always win.
Analytics (via my “Simple GDPR” plugin, which does server-side analytics), is now properly getting the geocode of the visitor. The map is now looking a bit more correct.
In a couple of days (if I remember), I’ll share the geo map of visitors. If anyone is interested.
Note: 500 errors still occurring, but they don’t seem to happen as often as before. I’m still digging into the access logs for info. (For those that are interested, I am using a registered/paid copy of “Log Lizard” program to analyze the access logs. Info about that program is here: http://www.lizard-labs.com/ .)
I changed jobs a little more than a month after the hurricane. I honestly thought that my previous position might go away, less than 1/2 the people were back on the job as of early November. I’d been lied to continually, so I jumped for marginally more money and hopefully more opportunity. So far my boss seems impressed with my work, which is a good thing. The debris in my neighborhood has been hauled off, but there’s a big bare spot in the front yard where it sat for several weeks. I don’t have a green thumb, and don’t have the money to pay to get it done properly, so I’m going to have the ugly yard in the neighborhood. (My neighbors tilled up their entire front yard, about a 4′ strip at a time, and planted Zoysia sod. It’s beautiful.) I just gave a handyman buddy of mine $1000 to start rebuilding the fence, and I’m going to pay him $50 / paycheck until the full cost is paid off. Traffic is a real headache for many people, but I’m getting to work at 7AM so it’s not too bad. I leave work at 5 PM, and it takes twice as long to get home. I assume that the value of my home has gone up, and I assume that my taxes are going to go up in the next few years. Those borrowed dollars have to be paid back, and property taxes is the way the county raises cash.
I’m still in a little bit of shock at what’s happened, like so many people here. I would like to make more money, as I’m just scraping by and I lost every penny I had trying to save my family in the years before the storm. Maybe the most wearying thing is that I don’t have a shoulder to lean on, but that’s been true all of my adult life. And so it goes.
In a couple of days (if I remember), I’ll share the geo map of visitors. If anyone is interested.
Yes, please.
I changed jobs a little more than a month after the hurricane. I honestly thought that my previous position might go away, less than 1/2 the people were back on the job as of early November. I’d been lied to continually, so I jumped for marginally more money and hopefully more opportunity. So far my boss seems impressed with my work, which is a good thing.
Congrats !
Like I always say, it is a lot easier to find a job when you have a job. Employers have a pack mentality, they figure if you are working for somebody else then you will work for them.
I’m beat. Bed time for me.
Thanks again to Rick, and everyone else who commented. This place exists because of the people who come here. The content IS the comments. I appreciate everyone who comes by, and especially those who’ve de-lurked in the last couple of days with good comments!
n
Email: Thunderbird, yes.
I used it (via IMAP) last autumn as a way to move us off of gmail entirely. Gmail offers no “export” function, so I hooked up Thunderbird and let it download everything. Then hooked Thunderbird up (simultaneously) to our new provider and copied all the mails over.
Copying was a pain – you have to do it folder-by-folder, and it’s not always obvious when gmail “folders” are just alternate views onto the same emails, so I have some duplicates. Which is better than losing them, anyway…
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“In other nooz – the Swiss will vote again.”
I somehow missed this in the news, so I read up on it. This is literally the first time in history that a court has annulled a referendum.
Context: The referendum would have forced tax law changes. The way deductions and such are currently set up, some married couples pay more taxes than they would if they were two single people living together. This annoys married folk, and eliminating this problem is the core issue. But getting a government to voluntarily reduce taxes…
By default, Swiss tend to vote referendums down, unless there’s a pretty persuasive argument behind them. This one was also voted down. However, it turns out that the base data provided by the government was wrong. The government stated that approximately 80,000 couples were affected by this problem.
In reality, it turns out that more than 400,000 couples are affected. So the government either deliberately lied, or was massively incompetent. The court decided that, had the scale of the problem been known, the result of the referendum very well might have been different.
This is an unprecedented situation, so it’s not legally clear what happens next. But, ultimately, the government will be forced to re-run the referendum. I predict that the population will be annoyed enough that it will be accepted, regardless of anything else.
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@Rick: As a Swiss guy I sure do hope you continue to allow non-CONUS access 🙂
I should definitely show up in your analytics – I don’t use a VPN to access this site, and my IP is identifiably Swiss. If you want more detail, let me know…
Since no login is required for this site, I don’t actually see much of a GDPR problem. Maybe when setting up an account, one should be informed of what data you collect, and what you do with it. Of course, IANAL.
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“What I meant was my wife will ask me a question about color or other item about the house. Ask what I think is a good color. I choose then am told that is a stupid choice. Thus I just give up and let her do what she wants.”
This. But you do have to express that opinion, or she thinks you don’t care. If I may analyze this a bit, I think it comes down to assuming the other person cares about particular things as much as you do.
My “hill to die on” was dinner choices, where I finally pointed out how frustrating this behavior was. Why ask, if you’re going to ignore what I say?
The thing is: I would have no problem eating the same small selection of things almost all the time. Example: breakfast for me is 2 strips of bacon, a fried egg, and a large cup of coffee. Every day, I cook exactly the same thing. If she were to ask me what I want for breakfast, well…
Meanwhile, my wife really likes to cook, and cares about “what’s for dinner” a lot more than I do. If I chose “pesto” when we had pesto last week, this was just not acceptable. OTOH expecting me to be a source of culinary inspiration was also misplaced.
After discussing this, I am now largely excused from making suggestions for dinner menus…
There is no need to use OR as I suspect that AND would be just as applicable. No different than US government where you can add in protecting their jobs.
I also use gmail for my personal domain email. I’m one of the grandfarthered original users. My account is free, though google doesn’t provide all apps or any other extras,but that’s ok, since I use it for email only.
I originally moved my email to google when I moved and got Comcast internet. They blocked port 25, so I couldn’t use my exchange server. I setup my mail to go to google, and I popped the mail off there and onto my exchange server. That was in 2005 or so, and I’m still doing it that way today, even though I’m now on google fiber and they don’t block port 25. Their spam filtering is reason I stay.
I leave a copy of messages on gmail when I pop them off. We (wife, son, and myself) get so little email, its not an issue.
If I had to just use gmail, I agree with what others have suggested. An imap client is perfect for what you need, and it’s what I would use on my main desktop. Web client/app for other devices.
I’ve contemplated getting rid of my exchange server, but I never do it.
I have been considering how and when to use the family domains I own to set up family email accounts that we control. Kids are 8 and 10, and then it’s just the wife and me. For personal mail, I’m still using an aol account I’ve had since the floppy disk days. Their spam filtering used to be excellent. Yahoo lets more thru now, and also has display ads in the mail area. yahoo also now scans mail for keywords (like google) which Aol didn’t do. If I didn’t have the same email addy for 20 + years I’d change in a heartbeat.
Periodically I used to use Thunderbird to suck down all the accumulated mail, but I haven’t for a couple of years.
n
@Nick: I like having a family domain, and I set up addresses for all of us: name@xxx.yy
Now that the kids are older, they are collecting a range of email addresses (work, clubs, whatever) – that’s how life is. I also have a variety of email addresses. But work addresses, club addresses and such come and go – the family address has (so far) remained the constant for everyone.
So, do set up those addresses. But then, there are two choices for each person. You can either forward the family address to your current mail provider (and maybe set up a “reply as” on that provider). Or you can use your family address as primary, and forward the old account to your family address. Either works, and the choice can even change over time.
What I find important is that the family address isn’t dependent on any particular company. If our current ISP were to go belly up, I own the address and could move it elsewhere.
Brad makes excellent points.
My email is a family domain. I’ve had it since, wow, just checked, 2000. I also have several aliases I use. For example, I have an alias for each major vendor, amazon, netflix, etc.
I do have to remind my 14yo to check his email occasionally, as i will send him links for things. Email will die when his generation grows up – they just don’t use it.
My oldest active email address is a yahoo address, which I’ve had since 1996 or so. Before that, I used whatever email was given by the ISP at the time (and/or school.)
!ITGuy1998: In my experience, our kids (early 20’s) do read email. It’s used by their jobs as well. And email is email is email – whatever client you use, whatever server you use, they can all talk with each other. I don’t think it will die out anytime soon.
The Whatsapp/Signal/Slack/whatever stuff is well and good, but there’s no common standard, no cross-communication. A gazillion different apps, all deliberately incompatible, in the name of competition. If the makers of those had 2 collective neurons to rub together, they would agree on a central standard (or maybe two, for live and not-live), and then compete on features. But the incompatible standards mean that none of them will ever gain the critical mass to be generally useful in the long term.
I’m grading today, and taking frequent breaks to avoid dying of boredom. Hence the frequent posts…
@Brad – similar here. I bought my own domain in 2003 or so and set up my own email address there. When I got married, I set up my wife’s email on the same domain. After the kids were born, I set up two accounts for them – a Gmail account (that I own, but uses their names) and a BWT account on my domain. This allows me to set up Android devices (tablets) for the kids and (soon enough) phones. They also have a “permanent” address that won’t change.
I’ve changed ISPs a couple of times and changed hosts twice since then. The BWT addresses and the Gmail accounts have remained.
Re- other methods of communication – I agree with you about email. It is a common standard that has stood the test of time. It may be enhanced or changed (such as rich text, html, etc.) but it remains. I have used other chat and messaging software, and the only thing that comes close to being consistent is SMS. I wonder how it will look in 10 years.
I have had family domains (.com, .net, .org, and .us when it became available) since 1996, they were not cheap to get and host back then.
Don’t forget to make arrangements in your Will and other Legal Papers for what happens to your domains when you are no more.
Like I always say, it is a lot easier to find a job when you have a job. Employers have a pack mentality, they figure if you are working for somebody else then you will work for them.
I kinda-sorta overcame the pack mentality at my current gig, but there is a lingering attitude that I should consider myself fortunate to have the job and they don’t consider me to be part of the future like the young’n’s.
Fine. It is a two way street. It wasn’t the young’n’s making camera images work at the new installation on Christmas morning, and the person who made them work isn’t going to be there forever.
rick
the rant was due limiting access to non conus, as someone suggested.
as you may know, no great wall succeed, the very first thing that comes to my mind is this date, dec 31 406
In an effort to distract myself, I just checked my yahoo email account. I opened the account January 14, 1998. So a little later than I thought. Btw, to find the info, you have to go into the privacy settings. took a few minutes to find it…