Weather yesterday was hotter and more humid, with lots of sun. Weather today? I guess we’ll see….
Had a nice fish dinner yesterday. New England knows fish, you gotta give them that. They don’t seem to know anything about air conditioning though.
This rental house isn’t cheap. It’s had a long series of remodels and expansions, and a fairly recent complete luxury kitchen and general makeover. NO AC. It was advertised with AC. One tiny window unit upstairs and one tiny window unit on the first floor don’t actually cut it. Both are also obviously brand new. Like they put them in yesterday.
The kitchen has Sub Zero fridge, granite for miles, and an 8 burner Thermidor stove. No AC. HOT AS HELL in this house and damp like a fat man’s belly wrinkles. I don’t think it’s at all unreasonable to put a freaking mini split AC unit in a million dollar house. No window coverings either. Missing outlet and switch plate covers. Peeling paint in one bedroom. And the Sub Zero fridge is currently 67F. It’s “finicky” according to the two pages of instructions taped to it, and often fails if left empty. So some jackass has put a gallon jug of red liquid labeled “antifreeze, do not drink” in the fridge. Who thinks putting a gallon of red poison in the fridge, in a juice container, is a good idea?
MIL arranged the rental and is ranting… booking agent is in Oregon, local management is unavailable. I’m going to put a gallon of poison somewhere else than the freaking fridge this morning and then I’m going to sit back and watch the show.
Vacations, who needs ’em.
n
MIL arranged the rental and is ranting… booking agent is in Oregon, local management is unavailable. I’m going to put a gallon of poison somewhere else than the freaking fridge this morning and then I’m going to sit back and watch the show.
Foreign ownership of some kind. I’m guessing Asian if the agent is on the West Coast. Probably purchased with cash. Millions if the place is on the water.
Local people used to own and run the places, but they cashed out as the asset prices reached a point where they couldn’t say “no”, and no one local can afford to buy into the game anymore. Welcome to the future.
When the asset prices crash, you’ll be able to pick up the places on the cheap again, but the deferred maintenance will be unaffordable.
We’re currently conducting our program in the basement of a church in West Liberty, IA. No signal of any kind down in this reliquary. My cell phone is up on a landing connected to my travel battery. Bluetooth hotspot away! I wonder if anyone will steal my phone on the way out?
Bluetooth hotspot away! I wonder if anyone will steal my phone on the way out?
More likely they would steal the travel battery.
Rental properties are always hot in the summer and cold in the winter …
At least that is my experience.
Glad you are having a good time with the outlaws.
“Capital One Breached, 100 Million Customers Affected”
https://www.pcmag.com/news/369824/capital-one-suffers-data-breach-affecting-100-million-custom
“A 33-year-old Seattle woman named Paige Thompson allegedly exploited a vulnerability in Capital One’s databases to steal credit card application documents from millions of customers, according to the FBI.”
I swear, I am beginning to think about getting Lifelock.
And Ms. Thompson needs 50 lashes with a five foot cane.
Only informs you after an account is opened then it is too late. Instead lock your credit report at all three agencies. That works. Have had two people try to get a Sprint phone and an online (only) bank account. I got letters from the companies saying identity could not be verified.
I was impacted by Experian breach and have opted for 6 years credit monitoring at all three reporting agencies. Seemed to be more to my benefit than $125.00. I can also extend Experian another 4 years for a total of ten years.
“A 33-year-old Seattle woman named Paige Thompson allegedly exploited a vulnerability in Capital One’s databases to steal credit card application documents from millions of customers, according to the FBI.”
I swear, I am beginning to think about getting Lifelock.
It should read “A 33-year-old Seattle *transwoman* …”
Political correctness means that part is left out of most of the stories. You may or may not consider it relevant.
My job in Seattle was largely based on my ability to pass drug and background checks, something their regular staff could not do in order to get onboard military airplanes to install the software. Trans or not, most of the developers had drug issues with some compounding their problems with immigration and/or criminal court records. The fact that I actually had the skills to install/debug the software was probably on 15% of why I was hired if I was pressed to put a number on the situation.
Trans would actually be considered a positive. When I obviously didn’t fit in with the other staff members, my wife joked about dresses on Casual Friday. I responded that it wasn’t so much the dress that was the problem as the Spanx.
Capital One is a bottom feeder Visa. I thought all of their staff was H1B or overseas. They company took a bunch of money from the State of Florida to build an office in Tampa, and then management staffed it with H1Bs and other temp worker visas (L1, etc) to the point that the nearby Hindu temple built the workers apartments to live in while they tried to win the green card sponsorship.
All of my neighbors in FL who went bankrupt buried tens of thousands of dollars in consumer debt on Capital One Visa cards before filing. It seemed like if you could fog a mirror, the company would issue a card.
Craziness at our doorstep.
https://www.commercialappeal.com/story/news/2019/07/30/southaven-mississippi-walmart-shooting-police-respond-report-active-shooter/1864992001/
This is our closest Walmart but the one we rarely visit because it’s “trashy” and just has a bad vibe. The regular violence of south Memphis is moving south into our area. Happy to be moving out in January.
Update: This shooting happened early this morning. We only visit the rural Walmart further south where the vibe is friendly not tense.
Drudge puts the shooting in the wrong state…
TWO SHOT DEAD AT WALMART IN TN…
Daily mail changed their headline from woman to trans woman which is pretty obvious based on the picture and was my first thought.
I don’t go to Walmart if I can avoid it at all. Way too much crime happens in the Walmart parking lot. There are many many articles available online about municipalities complaining that Walmart’s lack of policing impacts their ability to provide services because of the high demand the crime at Walmart places on their local departments.
Spent the day at the beach was very nice. And after showering will be off to one of the relatives rental units and we’ll be having some dinner and Cocktails.
Oh and while we were gone someone came by and fix the fridge . he knew exactly what to do because apparently it breaks all the time . Sub-Zero one door fridge with pull-out drawer freezer= POS.
N
I don’t go to Walmart if I can avoid it at all. Way too much crime happens in the Walmart parking lot. There are many many articles available online about municipalities complaining that Walmart’s lack of policing impacts their ability to provide services because of the high demand the crime at Walmart places on their local departments.
Dollar General is more exploitative in their approach to small towns IMHO, but we’ve seen Peak WalMart and are witnessing their decline.
Best Buy stores strike me as being increasingly creepy since their near death experience in the last decade, but I’ll go there before I head to the Austin Fry’s.
I’ve written before about my drive west a decade ago, stopping for a few hours sleep and a shower at a Four Points in Fairview Heights, IL. Within a year, both the Red Lobster (note — another chain in decline) and the Best Buy within visible range of where I parked my car at the hotel had been the scene of racially-charged violent incidents which ended up making national news.
I think I have my gate problem sorted out. It hasn’t been closing all the way. Sure, you can disconnect it from the gate and screw it out a few turns. I have.
Then I notice the gate doesn’t open fully. I have a rock….
Today I wandered up to re-set the close limit switch. (wrong term, but same thing) That did nothing. Or I’m too dense today to figure it out.
I even wore shorts! For the pockets. Out here, today, the only sign of any people was the folks buzzing around in the little training planes. No traffic or train noise at all. Just a few birds and crickety critters plus a few cow moos. Pretty nice. Pockets are handy, anyway.
Where the opener is attached to the gate, the bracket is slotted. I moved it to the other end of the slots and gate still doesn’t fully close. Oh…. wait a minute…. the bracket on the post is moving.
The post is oil well pipe. That’s what it’s called anyway. Well braced and everything set in about 3 feet of concrete. It’s a bit larger than chain link fence corner posts and the metal is about ¼ inch thick. Not easy to drill.
Chain link corner posts are 2 and 3/8 by 1/8 inch thick. I think. The oil well pile is about an eighth bigger.
The gate bracket on the post is slightly curved. Looks like it is shaped for a 4 to 6 inch pipe. Just guessing. Flat enough that bolting to a wall is not a problem. It’s attached with carriage bolts through the post. The bolts had loosened. Not fancy bolts, they came with the opener. I twisted one off when installing the gate… me and an eight inch crescent wrench. Hmm. I don’t know what happened. I think the bolts stretched. Because the jam nuts were still tight.
I see three ways to fix this.
Weld the bracket to the post. Need to find someone that does welding and hope I never need to change the bracket. Err, and the bracket shows no rust… might not be iron.
Find some washers that are shaped on one side to fit the post and flat on the other.
Or just bolt the hell out of it with some schedule 8 bolts. But with some shock washers (if I can find any in my junk cans) on each side of the bracket to spread the metal fatigue.
Oh. Wait. I just figured it out.
I need about a foot of angle iron stuff. But shaped like [ . Two inch wide by mumble mumble on the “legs” should work. I need to measure. But this will spread out the pivot point stress a lot. Then I go for the super bolts and torque the heck outta them…. with an actual torque wrench.
Easy. Right?
Oh, 103F on the north side of my house just now. No breeze.
Good luck, Paul. You and I think alike,,, gluttons for punishment 🙂
Oh, 103F on the north side of my house just now. No breeze.
76 F here in Sugar Land and has dropped 0.7 inches of rain so far. I caused this to happen since I turned on the water makeup line for the pool this morning. We have been losing about a 1/4 inch of pool water lately due to the heat and dryness.
76 F here in Sugar Land and has dropped 0.7 inches of rain so far. I caused this to happen since I turned on the water makeup line for the pool this morning. We have been losing about a 1/4 inch of pool water lately due to the heat and dryness.
I was hoping the sea breeze would push the showers towards us. My sprinkler system is hosed, and no one is available to look for another week.
I’d dig out the valve box myself, but I clocked 160 hours for the last two weeks of July, and that’s estimating tomorrow’s hours.
(Of course I’m not lucky enough to be fired for last week’s comment about who was or wasn’t “on top of things”.)
Naturally, the moment I dig out the box is when the sea breeze showers arrive.
Nice dinner with the wife’s relatives. Their rental is on a bay, and cost more than ours. They have been renting the same house for several visits. Owner lives next door. Makes a difference.
N
I’ve been working with a lot of graphic files lately – book covers, web pages with images of book covers, other related images.
Most of the images I create (book covers, banners for the web site) are PNG files, using Adobe Fireworks CS6 (out of habit; the program, not web-based). But PNG files can be pretty big, and aren’t optimized for web sites – they take too long to open.
So I have been converting within Fireworks, but that’s an extra step to do. I used to have XAT Image Optimizer, but that program hasn’t been updated for several OS versions.
Today, I had the sudden thought that it would be great to be able to right-click an image file in Windows Explorer and do a quick conversion to JPG. And I found a program to do it here: https://file-converter.org/ . Free to use, donation-ware, been around for a while.
Works really nice, and quick, and easy – right-click the file in Windows Explorer, click on the output file type you want, and it’s done. Works with all types of files – audio, image, video. Very nice little program.
Recommended.
Most of the images I create (book covers, banners for the web site) are PNG files, using Adobe Fireworks CS6 (out of habit; the program, not web-based). But PNG files can be pretty big, and aren’t optimized for web sites – they take too long to open.
I’ve used pngcrush on various projects. It is a command line tool which optimizes PNG files losslessly and has all kinds of options.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pngcrush
I think Pngcrush is now available via Cygwin. I know it is available via Homebrew on Mac, and I recall installing it via MacPorts on older versions of OS X.
The Gimp does a pretty good job with PNG optimization with its export.
I have been using png in preference to jpg for picture heavy powerpoint, exported as images. The sony and other bluray players I use for the slideshow playback (off a usb drive on a big screen tv) do a much better job of displaying the pngs. I didn’t notice any particularly large files.
I don’t think it does conversions but for resizing I still use the MS power toy- image resizer ( or the clone, depending on OS.) It’s a right click away, and will do every highlighted image with one command. I still use it often to resize phone pix for email inboxes…
n
I’ve been using XnConvert. Available for Linux, Windows and Mac. There is also NConvert which is a command line version. The programs have always worked well for me.