Fri. Aug. 29, 2019 – finally Friday

By on August 30th, 2019 in prepping

Cooler, but still humid (is my prescient guess, call me swami). [76F and 99%RH]

Headed into the long weekend and we’ve got a hurricane messing around down here.  I hope all of our correspondents in Fla. and the Gulf Coast are paying attention and making last minute adjustments to their preps.

I’m going to rotate another 15 gallons of stored gas tomorrow.  I may find another tank or two of propane to refill too.  I REALLY don’t want to take down antennas or secure the stuff in my driveway, so I’m hoping Dorian stays on the East Coast and doesn’t cross into the Gulf.

In other prepping, the last of my cucumber plants died.  Turned black, then shriveled up.  Peppers are still producing.  Single apple and orange are still there.  Meyer Lemon is still loaded up with green lemons maturing nicely.  It’s almost time to get the fall garden in according to the Ag Extension.  Maybe I’ll have better luck this fall.

I have to get the chainsaw repairs finished.  I’ve still only got the electric that runs, but I have parts and should be able to get at least one of the gas saws running.   I should probably get the gas gennie cleaned up and running too, as the whole house gennie is still sitting there, unconnected.  In fairness to me, the utility hasn’t replaced my service drop yet.  Their guy told me he’d log the request, but I haven’t seen or heard anything from them.  I really want their work done before connecting the gennie.  It’s more excuses, that’s for sure, but will avoid any complication if they don’t like the location of the gennie.

I took several buckets of bulk food to my secondary location.  I’ll rotate several back here and spot check to see if they’re still good.  Most of it was put up in 2014 or ’15 with no particular preservation.  It has been relatively cool there though.  I expect spoilage and am resigned to it due to my less that awesome available spaces.

I need to check my stored fuel at the secondary too, and I should probably fill some of the 5 gallon water jugs…

I have inflatable mattresses that need to find their way to secondary too.  It’s always something, which is why you shouldn’t wait for the last minute…

Time to wake the family and start breakfast.

Let me know what you did this week,

n

33 Comments and discussion on "Fri. Aug. 29, 2019 – finally Friday"

  1. Greg Norton says:

    Headed into the long weekend and we’ve got a hurricane messing around down here. I hope all of our correspondents in Fla. and the Gulf Coast are paying attention and making last minute adjustments to their preps.

    Pay attention in Texas too. If the storm gets into the north end of the Gulf and shuts down production on the rigs, the media will start talking about a “gas shortage”, just like they did two years ago.

  2. Nick Flandrey says:

    Looks like they revised landfall further south, and there is more of a hook to the north…

    More of that and it won’t make it over into the Gulf.

    No way of knowing but you have to plan based on something, which is a dilemma.

    n

  3. mediumwave says:

    Those dusky–erm, I mean pesky teens are at it again:

    NYPD: Teens Attack 67-Year-Old Woman With Her Own Cane in Queens

    Am I racist for noticing via the video that the attack apparently crossed racial lines?

    If so, so be it.

  4. Ray Thompson says:

    Am I racist for noticing via the video that the attack apparently crossed racial lines?

    Could be. But that would be politically incorrect and we all know this site is politically balanced. Thus by association you could not be racist.

    Of course the media would never report this as a hate crime. Had the skin colors been reversed Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson would be all over this looking for justice revenge. The news media would be having a field day with the DNC candidates all making some noise about it being Trump’s fault. But saying this could mark me as a racist. If being against bad biased reporting is racist, then I am.

    Subbing again today. Supposed to be the wife but she did not feel like doing it today so I took the task. With both of us as subs we can switch off, sometimes just doing half a day each. School likes us because they can generally get one of us and we are able to switch mid day if needed.

    Minimum wage job. 7.5 hours for $60.00. Yeh, not a living wage but not designed to be a living wage. It is more of something to do and help the school.

    I am funding a scholarship in the amount of $1,000.00 for 2020. It will be for trade school only and can be used for tuition or tools. The check will be paid to the school and not the student. The staff will decide the recipient based on who will benefit the most. There are enough scholarships and state money available for college but not so for trade schools. I think that should change. The amount is not much, less than $100.00 a month, but could really make a difference is some young adults life.

    The education system has pushed everyone goes to college way too much. Many students would be better served working with their hands. They would be able to find a good job with little school debt. Productive members of society rather than leaches with a liberal arts degree and tens of thousands of school debt. I have seen some of the work from the kids in the shop class and it is really excellent work.

    I want to call it “The Purple Ping-Pong Ball Scholarship”. Purple and gold are the school colors. It would be something different and will not have my name on the award. I want to have a small trophy made with a purple ping-pong ball on the top that would be given with the scholarship.

    Wife doesn’t like the name, I do, as does the school administration. Something fun, something different, something to get a chuckle at graduation.

    There are a lot of people that could give that much to students continuing their education. It would make a big difference in a lot of lives.

  5. Nick Flandrey says:

    @ray, that’s an awesome idea.

    Check out Mike Rowe’s Foundation too.

    n

  6. mediumwave says:

    I am funding a scholarship in the amount of $1,000.00 for 2020. It will be for trade school only and can be used for tuition or tools. The check will be paid to the school and not the student. The staff will decide the recipient based on who will benefit the most. There are enough scholarships and state money available for college but not so for trade schools. I think that should change. The amount is not much, less than $100.00 a month, but could really make a difference is some young adults life.

    Well done!

  7. mediumwave says:

    Apropos practical skills, here’s the first of a series of videos chronicling a couple of young guys reviving an abandoned truck. On the one hand their time could have probably been better spent working on almost anything else; on the other, the ingenuity and perseverance they display is remarkable.

    Spoiler alert:

    They do eventually drive the truck out of the brush under its own power, but not till episode five or six. Nevertheless, I’m sure that any of you guys who’ve worked on funky old cars in your younger days can relate.

  8. MrAtoz says:

    I am funding a scholarship in the amount of $1,000.00 for 2020.

    Trade/CC schools are the wave of the future. Good job, Mr. Ray.

  9. MrAtoz says:

    At the Ft. Lauderdale airport waiting for the Vegas flight. Gonna beat the storm by a day or so. Hope it comes to Vegas and drops some aqua.

  10. MrAtoz says:

    Suck it Fags!

    Gay gene a myth

  11. Ray Thompson says:

    Suck it Fags!

    They do. You’re just stating the obvious.

  12. JimB says:

    That scholarship is great. People should never apologize for “small” amounts: $1k ain’t chicken feed. It all adds up. Good on you, Ray!

  13. Greg Norton says:

    Gay gene a myth

    The LGBTQXYZ crowd should hope it is a myth.

    If it is ever proven to be real and easily determined via a blood test, many cultures on the planet will attempt breed it out of the population within a couple of generations via mass infanticide.

  14. nick flandrey says:

    So in the Doom and Gloom model,

    https://www.zerohedge.com/health/magnitude-63-quake-oregon-coast-raises-concerns-cascadia-subduction-zone-could-soon-rupture

    — the result of the Cascadia Rising mass exercise was possible millions dead, and months without recovery. They are taking the possibility seriously and moving hospitals and schools out of the most affected zone. Sooner or later, it will let go, that’s what they do.

    and Dorian just keeps on coming

    https://www.zerohedge.com/health/monster-hurricane-dorian-projected-be-very-big-perhaps-one-biggest

    –or it could be a tiny one that misses everyone. But that’s a bit less likely.

    Got preps??

    n

  15. nick flandrey says:

    “If it is ever proven to be real and easily determined via a blood test, many cultures on the planet will attempt breed it out of the population within a couple of generations via mass infanticide.”

    –people should be terrified of online genetic databases and testing. It’s like encryption, if they break it, every previous message becomes readable too. Who knows what a Caliphate would do with that?

    n

  16. SteveF says:

    Am I racist for noticing via the video that the attack apparently crossed racial lines?

    Pattern recognition is now a crime in the Anglosphere.

    Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson would be all over this looking for justice revenge a big payout to line their own pockets.

    FIFY

    re the scholarship: Excellent, Ray! For the idea, the targeting, and the name. As a couple said already, “only” a grand is nothing to sneeze at — that’s a small rolling chest and an auto mechanic’s starter set or a nice setup for an apprentice plumber or carpenter.

    For his birthday a few years ago, my dad and I set one of my sons up with a decent set of automobile and homeowner tools. (The only one of my sons who’s interested in doing such things. The other is very much a white-collar engineer who figures he’ll pay people to work on his car and his landlord can take care of problems in the apartment. Where did I go wrong?) It didn’t cost us much cash money, as Dad and I had enough spares to set him up. By the time we were done the kid had a few thousand dollars worth of tools, box, belt, and some consumables, enough to do car and house jobs beyond his skill level, for a couple hundred dollars at Sears.

  17. MrAtoz says:

    In the air. Bye Dorian.

  18. lynn says:

    _I Am Number Four (Lorien Legacies)_ by Pittacus Lore
    https://www.amazon.com/Am-Number-Four-Lorien-Legacies/dp/0061969575/?tag=ttgnet-20

    Book number one of a seven book young adult space opera fantasy series. I read the well printed and bound trade paperback published by HarperCollins. I plan to purchase and read more books in the series.

    The first book in the series has also been made into a movie of the same name. It was very faithful to the book and ok.
    https://www.amazon.com/Number-Three-Disc-Blu-ray-Combo-Digital/dp/B004SBQAL0/?tag=ttgnet-20

    For all of the billions of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, there are only ten habitable planets according to the book. As the inhabitants of the planet Mogadore invade the planet Loric, nine children and their guardians escape in a space ship. They arrive at planet Earth a long time later. Unfortunately, they were followed.

    My rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    Amazon rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars (1,441 reviews)

  19. nick flandrey says:

    “As a convicted felon, Pratchard was not allowed to own firearms , including this one ”

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7411777/Ex-Marine-kicked-armed-border-group-jailed-weapons-charges.html

    –dishonorably discharged for selling drugs. Felon in possession. Border group infiltrated by FBI informers. “How can you tell who’s the Fed? -Who’s urging you to commit crimes…”

    n

    added- point is, still had plenty of guns and ammo

  20. Greg Norton says:

    — the result of the Cascadia Rising mass exercise was possible millions dead, and months without recovery. They are taking the possibility seriously and moving hospitals and schools out of the most affected zone. Sooner or later, it will let go, that’s what they do.,

    I saw that article. A lot of communities in Coastal Oregon are trying to justify asinine expenditures on building fancy schools in the name of tsunami prep so they stir the pot of the Cascadia Subduction Zone.

    The author either doesn’t know the terrain or is fear mongering. “Everything west of I-5” includes the Coast Range montains in WA and OR, and while Portland’s downtown is just 50 feet above sea level, the terrain rises pretty sharply from the valley floors. Same thing in Seattle’s downtown area.

    I’ve seen similar articles going back 25 years, ever since they found the new fault line under Lake Washington and suddenly every building in Seattle had to be reinforced because the “big one” was going to happen at any moment. Lots of money spent … only for the old school buildings and houses to get torn down and replaced in the current Amazon-driven boom.

    After our Vantucky adventure, I don’t even look at a map of the Northwest anymore. No one would like to see something grim happen to Portland more than me, but I know it won’t within my lifetime.

    I’ll have to settle for the Measles pandemic. Now *that* was fun, especially when my wife’s former office emerged as one of the hot zones. I wouldn’t be surprised if Patient Zero was a regular at her employer’s clinics.

    (They know in WA/OR, but politics means we’ll never get the details of Patient Zero. Kaiser and my wife’s corporate masters were among the biggest employers on that side of the river when we lived there. One of those two are responsible for the entire fiasco.)

  21. lynn says:

    “Unix at 50: How the OS that powered smartphones started from failure”
    https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/08/unix-at-50-it-starts-with-a-mainframe-a-gator-and-three-dedicated-researchers/

    “Today, Unix powers iOS and Android—its legend begins with a gator and a trio of researchers.”

    I learned how to type on one of those old teletypes, an operators console for a Univac 1108, back in 1971.

    Hat tip to:
    https://www.codeproject.com/script/Mailouts/View.aspx?mlid=14558&_z=1988477

  22. Greg Norton says:

    I learned how to type on one of those old teletypes, an operators console for a Univac 1108, back in 1971.

    The community college I attended inherited two 3B2 AT&T System V Unix systems in the mid-80s. The semester I took in Fortran, developing on those systems, is the skill basis for my entire career.

    I was Senior Member of Technical Staff at Death Star Telephone. Those titles are still significant. My management received money to promote me to Principle Member of Technical Staff, but gave the title to my more political-minded project partner.

    He would have made Distinguished Member of Technical Staff — the equivalent of an IBM Fellow — if I had gone to work for Apple under the “liason” position they pitched to me during my site visit to Cupertino in 2012 after the Mac VPN project at the Death Star bogged down following my departure.

    My site visit abruptly ended when I told Apple management that I wouldn’t do shovel duty for my “friend” given what happened the previous time I held that job. Politely, of course, but they got the message. As I said, those titles still mean something.

  23. lynn says:

    Terminator: Dark Fate trailer
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxy8udgWRmo&feature=youtu.be

    The future still sucks. And Skynet lives !

    And does Linda Hamilton smoke three packs a day ? Wow, that is a smoker’s voice like none other.

    A review of the trailer:
    https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/08/locked-and-loaded-terminator-dark-fate-trailer-gives-us-even-more-ah-nold/

  24. Greg Norton says:

    “Today, Unix powers iOS and Android—its legend begins with a gator and a trio of researchers.”

    To be fair, iOS is a descendant of BSD, an attempt to fix many of the shortcomings in AT&T Unix, and Android is Linux, a clean implementation of a kernel targeting the Posix API which has emphasized application level compatibility throughout its history.

  25. lynn says:

    Latest Dorian cone.
    https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/storm_graphics/AT05/refresh/AL052019_5day_cone_no_line_and_wind+png/205313_5day_cone_no_line_and_wind.png

    Today’s cone brought to you by it is gonna suck to live in the entire eastern seaboard of Florida.

    Hat tip to:
    https://drudgereport.com/

  26. JimB says:

    Unix at 50

    Enjoyed the article and the video. I was always a hardware guy. Although I never considered myself a programmer, I was a user, and occasionally had to cobble together some stuff to get work done. I wasn’t very familiar with UNIX, but more so with VMS. Just being a user was painful enough. I couldn’t imagine being a programmer in those days and the earlier days of batch operations.

    One picture especially caught my attention: the guy with the violin. I worked around analog computers in the late 60s and early 70s. At one time I believed that analog might be around for a long time. I was partly right; analog lived on in special hardware-in-the-loop simulations. It was the only practical way to interface with the electronics.

  27. SteveF says:

    gave the title to my more political-minded project partner

    Yep, been there. The “lead” title went to the woman with the smooth line of BS who had lied about her knowledge of and experience with the toolstack used on our project and couldn’t get a Hello World going. And then the project manager was very upset when I told him I wasn’t going to renew my contract and stay on the project and do more work than the other 10 members combined. (That contract was the first in which I’d been the only American developer with all the rest being Indians but it wasn’t the last. And it set the pattern for the rest, of the Indian contractors being dishonest, lazy, and inept.)

    bogged down following my departure

    Yep, been there, too, repeatedly. I’m very good about documenting what I do, with a combination of code comments (eg, Javadoc) describing a method’s interface, stand-alone documents for users and developers, and daily journals describing why some approach didn’t work or where I found documentation of how to use some library. None of that matters, even when I send the project manager email with a list of where all the documents are on the network drive. Why, it’s almost like the H1-B contractors are unable or unwilling to read a word of English that they can possibly avoid.

  28. Greg Norton says:

    Today’s cone brought to you by it is gonna suck to live in the entire eastern seaboard of Florida.

    It could be a glancing blow.

    Jacksonville generally doesn’t get storms so the predicted track is interesting.

  29. nick flandrey says:

    That track is a relief to us here in the Gulf, but it’s gonna suck for Florida Man….

    n

    Just got back from rotating 25 gallons of gas out. That makes about 40 gallons of fresh gas on hand, with another 5 or 10 still in the cabinet.

    Two miles from my house it was raining so hard you couldn’t see and it sounded like hail. At home, barely a sprinkle.

    I need to buy some more Sta-bil. What I had in the cabinet has evaporated or been swollen out of the bottle. I’ll do that tomorrow.

    I thought I might get some limbs trimmed back, but with the current track, I’ll leave that on the list for another day.

    n

  30. nick flandrey says:

    What a bunch of humorless scolds. Get over yourselves people, absolutely NO ONE cares about your feelz.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7411533/Publix-slammed-creating-Hurricane-Dorian-cake-Florida-store.html

    This sort of sh!t gives precedent to banning dogs because they offend some people. Or R rated movies. Or visible elbows. Don’t like it, stay home.

    n

  31. mediumwave says:

    What a bunch of humorless scolds. Get over yourselves people, absolutely NO ONE cares about your feelz.

    Good of them to out themselves–y’know, for future reference.

  32. nick flandrey says:

    I’m going to bed, and sleeping late.

    I’ll see you in the morning.

    n

  33. Greg Norton says:

    This sort of sh!t gives precedent to banning dogs because they offend some people. Or R rated movies. Or visible elbows. Don’t like it, stay home.

    Publix is generally a conservative company. That’s the real problem.

    They were the big money behind “Governor Opie”. A sure thing … until he wasn’t.

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