Probably cool-ish and saturated. [68F and 99%RH] But I’m posting early because I’ve got a full day.
Non-prepping hobby today, sportsball games and swim practice with the girls, an auction pickup, and a variety of other stuff to do.
Not to mention the yard/garden/home work I need to do.
All this while under the threat of catastrophic rain. [weatherunderground has the rain coming after noon] When I had dinner, the sky was clear. When I went to bed all the sky was starting to fill in with clouds. The creeks and bayous were back in their banks on the outflow side of the city, but in the area northwest, they were full or out of their banks. That water will be passing thru the city today, with any new rain added to it. Our big holding tank, Addicks Reservoir, continues to rise. It’s doing its job of holding water that would otherwise flood the city, but if you live in its shadow, you get nervous.
Hopefully we’re not getting clobbered today.
I’ll edit this if we are… [not clobbering time at the moment]
n
umm,, begin to question???
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7016983/Mom-missing-four-year-old-Maleah-Davis-claims-father-abusive.html
“Mom of missing Maleah Davis claims the four-year-old’s stepfather is an ‘abusive molester’ and says he was ‘cleaning his apartment with bleach’ on the same day she vanished – as cops begin to question his story that she was ‘abducted by three men'”
n
30 years ago we had our 20 year old shake roof redone with Al panels. They were stamped out to look like shake and painted brown. They were placed over styrofoam panels for insulation and to prevent damage and crumpling when termite guys walked over them.
A great choice with no regrets.
Most homes in Vegas have concrete shingles. I don’t know why.
From yesterday, metal shingles are EXPENSIVE!
I forgot to mention the least popular, but maybe the best cost/benefit material. I don’t know what is called, but there are both shingles and panels made of a Masonite-like material. A neighbor has this, and it is about 40 years old with no sign of deterioration. Also, same style made of fiber reinforced concrete; one brand is Hardie plank.
Of course, ours is a dry climate, and things that last here might not in a wet climate. Reverse also true.
Most homes in Vegas have concrete shingles. I don’t know why.
Readily available material?
Composition shingles last about half the rated 30 year lifetime in the FL heat and humidity. I imagine it is similar in Vegas.
The downside of concrete in FL is the mildew which inevitably sets in and must be pressure washed off periodically. That wouldn’t be a problem in Vegas.
Light rain and cool (60f) here by the Mississippi.
Up all night dealing with wife’s medical issues. We finally fell asleep around 6am only to have the UPS driver ring the bell at 8:30 setting off the dog who HATES deliveries and waking everyone. Just now got he back to sleep. We all need rest today.
It has been so long now that I can’t recall the relative cost. OTOH, cost didn’t matter, if she wanted it……
Most houses in our tract had shake, those that replaced shake with ceramic or cement got the additional aspect of sag.
Our average is about 12 – 14″/year. GPS coordinates upon request.
Recently, insurers have demanded replacement of wood shingle and shake here.
Catching up on my reading here. I don’t research monitors anywhere near as extensively as I used to, I just find a Dell Ultrasharp model that looks like it will do what I want and read its reviews. If they look good (and they normally do), I find the cheapest reputable seller and I buy it.
I’m sure there are other good lines of monitors out there too, but it seems as though Dell’s Ultrasharps have had a consistently good reputation for several years.
Re: roofing material
I was surprised to discover where we lived overseas that almost no one uses composition shingles. In the UK it was mostly concrete shingles or tile, in Hong Kong, everyone lives in apartment buildings built up on pillars to let the Typhoon winds through. In New Zealand, it was again concrete shingles, tile, and lots of metal roofing. I am no fan of composition shingles and when our current roof comes end-of-life in about 5 years, I will have metal installed.
metal is not approved by our HOA. The roofs and front siding accents were all shake shingle originally so they’ve been sticklers about what replaces them. I’ve currently got a very thick, 3D architectural shingle.
Dell Ultrasharp 24″ here, x2. They are height adjustable, have good color, and weren’t super expensive.
openweathermap’s forecast called for rain here at 130, and that’s when it started.
Currently coming down pretty good, we’ve gotten only .29inch by my gauge, but that will have to update soon to much higher. Or maybe not. I was at Lowe’s and their gauge is showing .49in, which may be why I think it rained more. the gauge in our neighborhood is showing .24 which is pretty good agreement with mine.
n
When I replaced my roof, post hurricane, I was told that the manufacturers of metal roofs will not warranty them if you’re too close to the open ocean, which I am, and much of the population of the county also is.
And FWIW last year the golf course where I play, which has good reason to keep track of weather data, recorded over 100″ of rain, an all time record. We’ve only had 20″ this year, so we’re down a bit.
I’ll try to keep the Dell Ultrasharp in mind.
I still like my KDS 24″ monitor. $369 with shipping way back in April 2008.
It replaced a 21″ Dell Trinitron that I bought on eBay as part of a pallet of 10 for $510. I had to go to Austin to pick them up. I kept two that looked nice to me and sold the rest to folks in the local computer club at enough over cost to cover the truck’s gas. So, $55 or $60, whatever. Everyone was happy. That was in 2003.
I have a Viewsonic 4×3 ratio 19″ LCD monitor and yeah, it’s from eBay and yeah, the color is just as stunning as the ads make it appear. It’s in the corner…. as a spare.
30 years ago we had our 20 year old shake roof redone with Al panels. They were stamped out to look like shake and painted brown. They were placed over styrofoam panels for insulation and to prevent damage and crumpling when termite guys walked over them.
A great choice with no regrets.
The HOA strongly wants 30 year composition shingles that we get 15 to 20 years out of. Nothing like a good hurricane to furl the edges of the shingles with 90+ mph winds. Shoot, the HOA sued my fellow homeowners that put solar shingles on their roof and federal law explicitly supports those.
Plus, I intend to be out of this house in a year or two. Even though my neighborhood just took a hit since 50 or so homes got flooded this week. If it was just the wife and I, I would not worry. But my daughter rules our safety issues.
I have a Viewsonic 4×3 ratio 19″ LCD monitor and yeah, it’s from eBay and yeah, the color is just as stunning as the ads make it appear. It’s in the corner…. as a spare.
I have a 4×3 ratio LCD for my primary desktop display. I do a lot of coding.
I had to give up my CRT monitors living in Vantucky and having a house on the line of sight between a Coast Guard Commander and her base at Portland Airport. I’m not sure what kind of comm gear the CG uses these days, but my tube monitor would go crazy when the neighbor would fire up the radio.
I have a 19″ 4×3 Viewsonic LCD. That monitor will leave the desk only when it doesn’t work anymore.
Paul, I still have two 19″ short neck CRT ViewSonic monitors, one for my wife’s computer, that are no longer used. I used them for photo editing and text until LCDs became good enough and affordable. My experiments with early LCDs showed me their poor color gamut and text aliasing. Eventually these issues were solved, the latter by the major operating systems. The result is now taken for granted. I still use my first ViewSonic LCDs, one a standard inexpensive one, and the other an early IPS panel that cost three times as much. Side by side and viewed straight on, it is hard to tell them apart. The IPS has a much wider viewing angle, and I would not consider anything else, until OLEDs become affordable.
My cell phone is an older Samsung Galaxy Note 3, and its panel is stunning. Smooth text scaling from microscopic to big. Its pixel pitch is something over 400/inch. Color, when adjusted properly, is just boringly accurate. Can’t wait to get a desktop display that is anywhere so great.
Added. I have always bought monitors new, except at work, before I retired. There, I could sometimes get expensive monitors used by graphic artists when they upgraded. I had used some really good monitors back then. The stuff approved for new purchase was usually of mediocre quality, and looked it.
Except… I had the opportunity to spec out Viewsonic 21″ Pro series monitors for our small office. These replaced some Panasonic 21″ older monitors that had looked and served well. Yes, Panasonic; who knows. We replaced all our computers (about seven people,) and bought everything new in a fit of excess. All of us were blown away by the ViewSonic monitors. There were other, better monitors, but ViewSonic was always the most bang/buck in those days. Didn’t hurt that their HQ was nearby, and I could go there and see all their models on display. They were small then, and very willing to “help” potential customers.
I’m out of bottle monitors. Finally. I have the Viewsonic and an AOC cheapo 20″ or so I bought from Woot.com for about $100 and an Acer that is about the same size. They work, I might need a spare.
I didn’t know Panasonic made monitors. They use to make good stuff… I had their ball and chain am/fm radio and with a cable to the old Magnavox record player, that radio would crank! I don’t know what happened to it. It probably got Sam’ed when I had my broken leg. Little brother trashed all my stuff.
I have a 4×3 ratio LCD for my primary desktop display. I do a lot of coding.
My programming monitors are a 12+ year old 27 inch Samsung IPS 1920 x 1200 monitor that I run at 1920 x 1080 due to my vision issues. I also have a Samsung 19 inch 1280 x 1024 LED monitor that I run at 1024 x 768. Both are awesome when I use my monovision programming glasses set at 18 to 24 inches of vision for my eyes. I have my text set at 100%.
The older I get, the more everything is a compromise.
At home, I have a single LG 27 inch LED monitor running at 1920 x 1080. But I have the text display set to 125%. But I don’t have a pair of programming glasses there.
I’ve got my text at 125% and it looks great on the dell 24’s on win8.
It looks absolutely horrid on the win10 machine with the 23″ viewsonic. Images look good, but the text is blocky, with different strength verticals, etc., like replacement fonts used to look. I blame win10
I also scroll zoom almost everything, especially web stuff.
n
Annnnnnd, the Brazos River is heading down now:
https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?wfo=HGX&gage=RMOT2
speaking of web stuff, I just went to a site to enter a giveaway… and it tried to load 27 scripts. 27. F their prize.
I have noticed that the junkier the site the more scripts they run. It’s astounding how much of the web is taken up with scripts bogging everything down. No wonder my 300Mbps connection doesn’t seem that much faster.
n
Over The Hedge: Suburban TV Guide
https://www.gocomics.com/overthehedge/2019/05/11
Heh. And yes, the animals are judging.
Nick, I have very little experience with Win 10, but the text on my test machine looks good at default settings. You might look for some anti-aliasing settings. Don’t have access right now, but my $0.02
Of course it’s Donald Trump’s fault their farmers can’t grow enough chickens or pigs…
When your failed state can’t even get a break from the other failed states….
n
speaking of web stuff, I just went to a site to enter a giveaway… and it tried to load 27 scripts. 27. F their prize.
I have noticed that the junkier the site the more scripts they run. It’s astounding how much of the web is taken up with scripts bogging everything down. No wonder my 300Mbps connection doesn’t seem that much faster.
I use Ublock Origin. It just works.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/
Ublock Origin likes this website, zero blocks.
I looked at the settings in my win10 machine. I didn’t see anything weird, set to 125%, arial font (although it wasn’t clear if that was the system font, it didn’t seem to make much difference).
I DID turn on cleartype and after the tuning process, it looks a lot better. I guess I never did it when I set the machine up.
n
Rain has just about faded away, with .49 inches here at the house.
Sun might even be poking thru a bit.
Certainly not the deluge we were forecast.
n
I’m using noscript and adblock plus, which do a pretty good job. I do find a fair number of sites that are just blank until turning on at least one script. That’s just astoundingly bad design in my book.
Most sites I visit for the first time need to have at least the home domain ok’d for scripts. Commerce sites need it for the catalog, cart, and payment functions, so I’m ok with that. The worst are sites aimed at promotion or who’s audience is general web user…
I’ve quit linking to gatewaypundit because they’re currently using some anti-blocking tool that covers half the page. They’ve always needed to have ads and scripts blocked. DailyMail is an offender, but once you figure out which scripts are needed for content, you can still block the other half without the nag. Zerohedge is hideous on my phone with no blockers at all, but looks great with just the ad blocker.
It’s all free, so complaining about it is sour grapes, but man it’s getting polluted out there.
n
I have AdBlock Plus. On Firefox. I had Duck Duck Go’s privacy thingy that showed what scripts and trackers it is blocking.
All that is now in my HOSTS file.
And, no, bless yer heart, but I ain’t turning of my ad blocker to read your site. I’ll find the content elsewhere.
And hey, stupid question… they get paid just for displaying an ad? I never click an ad.
And hey, stupid question… they get paid just for displaying an ad? I never click an ad.
No questions are stupid. I think that they get paid for ad views and that they get paid for clickthrus. Of course, everything is negotiable and the website owners are complaining mightily about reduced ad revenue.
Here is how Amazon allows advertising on their pages. They used to use Google Ads but they got rid of the middle man a decade ago. Man, I am kicking myself for not buying 10,000 shares of Amazon when it was $2 14 or 15 years ago and was buying crap off it all the time. So is my Dad.
https://advertising.amazon.com/
I ask the same stupid question, Paul…
If nobody sees the ad due to script blocking or Hosts file,
was it still an ad?
If they know what ad to show you, does it matter than you
ignored or did not see the ad?
The whole ad based model is imploding as companies realize that they aren’t getting what they are paying for. See the articles about J&J cutting their online ad spend and seeing exactly no change in their sales as an example.
n
see also, rates for ads have fallen drastically.
The trick to displaying ads (after you find someone whose ads will get you revenue) is to not let the browser initiate the display of the ads. You (the web site owner) create the HTML/CSS so it appears to be from your site, not the advertisers. That takes a bit more work on the web dev’s part, but (I believe) that the ad blockers will see it as content from the site, not from the advertiser.
The same issue of ad-blockers blocking things happens with visitor tracking. If you (the web guy) use the easy way out, you’ll just paste someone’s (Google Analytics – GA – for example) code on your page. That causes the browser to make a request to the GA site, not your site. And the visitor’s ad-blocker will block the GA code, so the web owner has incomplete visitor stats.
So the trick which I use (and I am sure that others use it, because there are many web guys smarter than me) is to do server-side analytics. When someone visits your site, you do the tracking with code that executes on the server, not the client. That gives you (the web site owner) better visitor stats that include those visitors that use ad blockers.
For instance, this place does server-side visitor tracking. You (visitor) won’t see any requests to the GA site, but I am tracking visitor counts because of code running on the server. That code still ‘feeds’ into GA, so I can see Google Analytics for this site for everyone, including those visitors that are using ad-blockers.
So, a smart web guy will do server-side analytics (like I do on all my sites). I suspect the same thing can be (and probably is) being done for showing ads.
Years ago, I wrote a server-side ad platform that you could install on your web site, and all the ads were displayed by the server, not from third-party sites. The platform didn’t go anywhere, but it was an interesting programming project.
All of the sites that I build have the ability to do server-side analytics tracking. I can ‘see’ the visitors to the site, even those that have ad-blocking that would normally block GA ) tracking.
My new PLEX Media server came in handy this evening when our Xfinity Cable & Internet went out in the middle of a Jack Reacher film. I simply used ROKU app to search my local video library and we watched a few episodes of “Corner Gas”. (If you’ve never seen that Canadian comedy you should check it out).
I am very happy with PLEX performance as a media server. I still have issues in categorizing my media so it’s easy to search but that’s not a PLEX issue.
BTW, I gave up on http://www.fubo.tv . I just did not like the fact that there was no preview while I was fast forwarding my Houston Astros game. So it was a complete guessing game when I fast forwarded the baseball game. And the picture was grainy, it looked like they were using a very lossy compression method.
I am trying out Hulu Sports right now and not any happier. In fact, Hulu Sports does not carry AT&T Sports who owns the Houston Astros broadcast. I am watching the Rangers versus the Astros right now on Fox Sports channel on Hulu Sports, they own the Texas Rangers broadcast rights. The picture is great on my LG 4K tv. But they do not allow fast forwarding during commercials which torques me off.
The trick to displaying ads (after you find someone whose ads will get you revenue) is to not let the browser initiate the display of the ads. You (the web site owner) create the HTML/CSS so it appears to be from your site, not the advertisers. That takes a bit more work on the web dev’s part, but (I believe) that the ad blockers will see it as content from the site, not from the advertiser.
I think that Ublock Origin just has a number of advertiser servers listed and refuses to show content from those. Works very well as I was having problems with Firefox going into loops and having to be killed. The programmers for Firefox recommended Ublock Origin to me in their bugzilla system as they had extreme trouble finding the thread grabbers.
Well, I’m off to bed. Before I can go though, I need to make a mom’s day card for my wife. I got her present already. Kids were not interested in getting anything for her, so that’s a fail… but I did 🙂
n
Forecast for tomorrow is sunny and clear. Crazy
Monitors and graphics: It’s funny, how the generations go by. I used to swear by Viewsonic: when I was studying, I invested in a huge, high-res beast (my friends said it looked like an ordinary monitor on steroids). I think the resolution was 2560×1440, and I had good eyesight back then, so I cranked down the font size and got an incredible amount of stuff on the screen.
We recycled our last bottle-monitor years ago, after we bought a whole collection of commodity flat-screens (1280×1024) for the family with VGA/DVI connectors That’s also around the time when we went to two monitors per PC. The last of those monitors collected dust in my IT closet for years – and was recycled (along with all the old VGA/DVI cables) last year.
Now, we all have dual 1920×1200 monitors from Dell. I am very happy with Dell monitors – haven’t used anything else for years. The connections are either HDMI or DisplayPort.
– – – – –
For roofing here, they use a lot of ceramic shingles. There are good ones and bad ones. On our house, the main roof has shingles from the 1930s – when we had the roof repaired two years ago, the roofers said “shingles are fine” and just replaced a couple of broken ones. OTOH we have a little roof over the entryway that was added much later. The shingles were basically only being held together by moss, and had to be replaced entirely.
– – – – –
Lastly, ads: Part of the reason why the big, trashy sites don’t serve up ads themselves are the exchanges. When you visit the site, they have Javascript that sends your visitor information to big ad exchanges. They try to categorize you (based on cookies, IP address, fingerprinting, whatever), and then hold a real-time auction: “Who wants to show an add to a 60yo white male living in Texas, estimated income XYZ, visiting site ABC?” The winning offer gets their ad selected and displayed.
IOW the sites have given up control over what ads they show. And the advertisers have only a little control over what sites their ads get displayed on. This is how malware gets downloaded over reputable sites, and how reputable advertisers find themselves advertising in unfortunate places. Outsource your marketing = outsource your reputations.
The whole ad-supported model for websites needs to die. I don’t understand how it still exists.
Money, lots of money. Sites that don’t allow me to visit with my ad-blocker enabled don’t get visited. I DVR most shows to skip ads.
Money, lots of money. Sites that don’t allow me to visit with my ad-blocker enabled don’t get visited. I DVR most shows to skip ads.
Whose dvr are you using ? I am thinking about keeping Directv just to be able to watch the Astrod and my Aggies.
Whose dvr are you using ? I am thinking about keeping Directv just to be able to watch the Astrod and my Aggies.
Kneel before Astrod!