mid 70s and saturated, I’m sure. [74F and 99%RH]
This is the one year anniversary of the death of Dave Hardy. Frequent commmentor, keen observer, friend of the blog. Pray for the repose of his soul, and his wife and daughter. Raise a glass to absent friends.
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From a website aimed at cops, comes this article:
“As police and firefighter numbers fall, officials urge disaster prep”
A few pull quotes, but you should read the whole thing-
“”So even if you were the slickest agency in the world, and you dealt with disasters all the time … if you train every day, a disaster is still called a disaster for a reason,” said Amy Donahue, a professor in the department of public policy at the University of Connecticut. “Even if you devoted all of your resources to these rare events, you still would find yourself struggling to manage them.””
“We’ve learned through some of our exercises, through Cascadia, which was a national exercise, that maybe it’s more realistic to expect that help in a week and maybe two weeks,” Barrington said. “With those kinds of time frames, it’s very important that the citizens be able to have the resources available that they can survive and live for multiple days without help.”
“‘EVERYBODY IS A FIRST RESPONDER’
Last year, FEMA released its 2018-22 Strategic Plan for disaster response, which emphasized “shared responsibility across all layers of government down to the individual.” In other words, residents of the affected communities are their own first responders.
“If you’re talking about a sudden large-scale disaster, there will never, ever, ever be enough professional first responders right when they’re needed, right when a disaster strikes,” Simpson said. “Everybody is a first responder.””
…
“During a disaster, it may be up to family, neighbors and even strangers to save themselves and others.
“They’re saved by bystanders,” Simpson said. “That’s actually the frontline of first response in a large-scale disaster.””
“People, just individual, regular people like us,” Donahue said, “don’t tend to put too much, if any, energy into being ready in the most simple and basic ways for a disaster. If a whole lot of people were just a little bit more prepared, it would make a very big difference.”
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I got a few things done this week (and last).
I got wheels for my 40 gallon water tank.
I sprayed the grapevines for caterpillars, again.
Pruned the citrus.
Added food to the pile, moved several buckets of bulk to my offsite site.
Ate some of my stored food, tried some new recipes.
Bought a bunch of stuff- Build parts for gubs. Propane heaters. Water filter. Some other defensive items. Some medical stuff. All on the secondary market. No itemized receipts. Sometimes no receipts at all.
Put a case of Mountain House in the truck. Getting stuck at school with the kids was not on the radar. Looking more seriously for a boat. If I had to go get the kids in a high water emergency, I could walk in, but it would be better to have a boat of some kind.
Got another pair of wellies (big boots).
Working on installing a roof rack on the Expedition. Would work well for a jonboat or open kayak, or inflatable.
Reading through “Bushcraft First Aid- A Field Guide to Wilderness Emergency Care.” Can’t recommend it unless you are starting from absolute zero. His info on tourniquets is out of date and wrong. Makes you wonder what else is OOD and wrong…
Feels like there was some other stuff in there too, but that’s all I can think of at the moment.
It feels like time is really short. Lots of bad things hanging by a thread, literally just a heartbeat away. Get some training. CERT, a PD CPA class, EMT, or self defense. Get your ham license, it’s easy and can be a lot of fun. Plus, you’ll meet people, many of whom are like minded. Meet some people. Go to your local county, city, or neighborhood meetings. Find a ham club. Go to the Show and Shine car show Sunday morning… get out of the house. Heck, just go yard sale-ing and chat with folks. Take the tenor of the tribes.
Don’t put it off. .Gov is late to every party, and even they are saying you need to do more to get ready!
n
My hands are like paddles, and my trigger finger is stiff and sore (old damage.) That probably means the barometer moved a lot, and we’re due for some weather.
(wow, web is crawling today, trying to check weather and pages are loading so slow I see all the alt text load…)
n
Subbing again today, same teacher as last time. Art which also includes some robotics stuff. Interesting separation of duties for teaching. There is also two 3D printers in the classroom, a tool chest full of electronic components and small Arduino computer boards.
Last week I helped the class get started on creating a BEAM BOT. A little device made from scraps that moves. No intelligence. I helped with the initial assembly which required some soldering which the students had never done. I did come in one day this week on my own time to help finish the robots.
Generally good classes except for 1st period, freshmen, art. Freshmen are truly annoying creatures.
I have set in motion what I need for my Purple Ping Pong Ball scholarship. $1K for vocational school only. Payable only to the school and the student must start by January 1 of the next year. I am also going to have a little trophy made with a purple ping pong ball on a wooden base to be given on graduation night to the winner. Such winner being chosen by the staff based on who they think will benefit the most. Less than $100.00 a month out of my pocket, less than $25.00 a week. If it will help a young adult to a worthwhile and productive career then well worth it.
That’s awesome Ray.
n
SRSLY windows? 10% cpu load and my mouse still stutters? Pagefile using 100% of disk because 16 GIG of ram isn’t enough?
WTF in this day and age that the desktop ever visibly redraws, or mouse stutters. It’s ridiculous.
n
This morning Firefox crashed. Which is odd. I restarted it, the tabs loaded and then Windows re-booted. I may be watching Black Friday sales for a new PC. Bleh.
It doesn’t seem like a year since OFD passed.
I’m digging a little bit deeper, as the apparent slow internet is just me.
Watching resource monitor, FFox has 100 hard memory faults/sec. I can stop and start it and watch, and it’s pretty consistent. This is v69.0 It wants me to update to 69.0.1
Oddly, an older version that I use as a portable app initializes with LOTS more memory errors, but then stabilizes to only a few/sec.
I’m going to update and see what happens.
n
added- now instead of a steady average of ~100 faults when ffox is running, it’s very choppy going from 12 to 260…
Not sure if any of that is relevant but there it is.
and now it’s stable at 0-4 faults/sec
n
Keep it classy ladies….
“Rep. Rashida Tlaib leads ‘impeach the motherf****r’ chants at an anti-Trump rally on Capitol Hill’s East Lawn just hours after announcing that she was selling the controversial slogan on a t-shirt
Rep. Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and other notable politicians from the Democratic party joined the demonstrators on the East Lawn of the Capitol
Footage shared by Roll Call shows Tlaib leading the chant and stating: ‘Impeach the…’
The crowd loudly cheered as it finished the controversial statement
Just hours prior to the video being posted, Tlaib shared on Twitter that she was selling the infamous slogan as a t-shirt for $29.00 ”
–nothing says “statesman” like yelling ‘motherfukcer’ to a crowd…
n
Nothing to see here….
” New Census finds 22.1million non-citizens and almost 45MILLION foreign-born residents living in the U.S. – the highest number in more than a century
The Census Bureau released estimates from its annual American Community Survey on Thursday. Researchers found a record 13.7% of the U.S. population were born in another country.”
–you are being replaced. And not by educated Swedes, who just want to work hard, or Czechs with college degrees. I guess we’ll get a crash course in the decline and fall of empires when the imported barbarians strip off the wealth of the country and fail to maintain the technological base. Look at any city in Africa or south of our border to see what happens when western technological society no longer maintains the systems… where they once existed.
n
added- I wonder what the doubling rate is?
As if the impeachment kabuki wasn’t sufficiently horrifying, She’s baaaack!
Police Are Investigating A White Woman Who Yelled The N-Word And Said She Was Pro-Lynching At A CVS
Guessing that there’s a high probability that this woman was provoked by some sort of unsatisfactory encounter with a POC with an attitude.
Or people are simply getting tired of the PC, and are willing to speak their mind. Kids in school seem to be “shocking” people left and right….
n
I’m part Swedish and if want to call me a Swede, that will not offend me.
Blood drive at the school, just donated a pint of the red stuff. So far over my lifetime by my shirt sleeve calculations I have donated about 23 gallons of blood. Started when I was a young’n in the USAF. O-POS which is a fairly desirable blood for donating.
They also have this machine that extracts plasma. Sucks a bunch of your blood out, withdraws the plasma, mixes the red blood cells with saline, and stuffs the result back into your body. I have not had that done and really have no plans. I am too old school.
What has changed over the years are the number of questions about one’s history. They also extract a small bladder of blood when first withdrawing that is tossed. That is to get rid of any skin cells or other tissue that might have gotten forced into the needle when the needle is inserted. They also take three sample bottles that I am guessing are used for testing before the blood is used.
I agree:
A.F. Branco Cartoon – What A Stretch
Thanks, A.F. Branco
Sending Fair Winds and Following Seas to the soul of Dave Hardy. Peace Brother.
/pity party on/
@Nick, as you asked a couple of days ago, I am mostly doing okay and yes, sorry, but I am more surly these days. Call it the frustrations of constant pain and not being able to do more, but some progress is still progress. I do get some things done, but very limited as I cannot walk while carrying anything, not bend over very far, not stand for too long, and definitely not knell down to work at ground level. The cartilage in my feet, ankles, knees, and lower spine is essentially gone. It is a wonder that my hips are in relatively good shape and my bone density is good. I am at the legal limits of pain medication that the gooberment (WA State more restrictive than Federal) will allow my Doctor to prescribe. It is no wonder people turn to the streets.
/pity party off/
Temperatures are going to be cooler than normal and snow is forecast for the mountains above 2,000-feet this weekend.
Time to start preparing the winter shelters for our feral cat colony. It will take me longer, but I may get some help. The raccoons have been coming around raiding any leftover cat kibble, I catch them on my Wyze Cams (https://www.amazon.com/Wyze-Indoor-Wireless-Detection-Assistant/dp/B076H3SRXG/), another sure sign that Fall is coming.
I hesitated to mention this because it seemed like only a local matter. The story about the tweet is about two weeks old, but the revelation about the slur being “self-inflicted” broke only yesterday: Radio host threatening to sue over anti-gay tweet the station claims he sent himself
If it weren’t for the hoaxes, there’d hardly be any “hate crimes” at all.
I took some canned peas (16) from the bugout site to the house. I will replace them with my next trip to Sams Club.
Heading up to Dallas in a little while. Gonna watch my Aggies beat up on Arkansas and visit my infirmed father-in-law. I am driving the rice rod, this should be fun. At 80 mph, it pulls 4,000 rpm, just a little buzzy. Turn the radio up !
I’m part Swedish and if want to call me a Swede, that will not offend me.
My wife grew up in Orlando in the 80s with a Taiwanese mother. Watching “Fresh Off the Boat” doesn’t offend her. She watches all the time.
Of course it is not totally accurate and a bit broad. As my wife points out anytime someone asks how she feels about the program, the truth would be too preposterous and dark for network TV.
Heading up to Dallas in a little while. Gonna watch my Aggies beat up on Arkansas and visit my infirmed father-in-law. I am driving the rice rod, this should be fun. At 80 mph, it pulls 4,000 rpm, just a little buzzy. Turn the radio up !
Jimbo needs a decent season. If the Jameis Winston experiment ends this year in Tampa (which looks increasingly likely), ownership will want someone to blame to keep the season ticket holders through yet another rebuilding effort.
A losing season combined with the increasingly dire news out of Tallahassee regarding the state of the program in Tallahassee when he dragged his Christmas tree to the curb shortly after Thanksgiving in 2017 will make Jimbo an easy mark for the Glazer family.
ManU fans are calling for the Glazers to sell their favorite team before the damage gets any worse. Tampa won’t be that lucky.
Dadcooks, sympathies and best wishes. You might try mixing alcohol with your pain meds to make them more effective.*
* Standard disclaimer: 95% of my advice is bad and is likely to result in your arrest and deportation or the in destruction of your liver.
Yah, though I have confidence in the ability of the poor downtrodden put-upon victims advocacy groups to continue defining “discrimination” and “hate crime” down in order to keep the money flowing.
re blood and organ donation, I’ve stopped donating blood and did not check the organ donor box when I got my new license card. Everyone profits either monetarily or by receiving life-saving human products … except the donor or his heirs. You can get an idea of the buckets of money involved by chatting with people at a blood bank, hospital, or insurance company about what they charge or what they pay. Lips, in my experience, get zipped right quick.
I’m pretty sure the “critical and life-threatening shortage of organs” would become a thing of the past if a decedent’s heirs could get $50k in exchange for his organs. Yes, that would open up potential other problems, but the fact remains that a liver recipient’s life is saved, any number of doctors and other medical people get paid, any number of administrators and functionaries get paid, and the donor’s wife and kids get nothing except a verbal thank you.
On top of that is the ineptitude and corruption of the American Red Cross. The local office twice had to throw out a freezerful of blood because of paper trail screwups. I’d recently donated a pint before each occurrence, and each occurrence was immediately followed by hair-on-fire local alerts about critical blood shortages and begging people to come in and donate.
@SteveF, a few fingers of BSB (Brown Sugar Bourbon) or Jack Daniels Single Barrel Select do help. WRT your disclaimer, I get two complete blood workups every year and my Doctor says I’m doing better than the majority of men my age. At least that part of me is working well, that includes my heart, lungs, liver, and other internal stuff. Joints and nerves are another story.
I’m sad to say that neither I, my Wife, or Kids are organ or blood donors. My Wife witnessed way too many (virtually 100%) organ harvests where the team that comes in showed no respect for the deceased during the procedure or after. This was not isolated to just her last hospital before retirement but also all the hospitals she worked at in WA State, Californication, and Virginia.
A glass raised to Dave Hardy. And prayers for his wife and daughter.
Amen.
I’m not willing to subject myself to Moxie, but I raised a Dr Pepper. That’s pretty close, right?
n
I’m sad to say that neither I, my Wife, or Kids are organ or blood donors. My Wife witnessed way too many (virtually 100%) organ harvests where the team that comes in showed no respect for the deceased during the procedure or after. This was not isolated to just her last hospital before retirement but also all the hospitals she worked at in WA State, Californication, and Virginia.
My wife saw the same thing in Tampa with LifeLink (or whatever they call themselves these days), the transplant organ harvesting group. I don’t think it a coincidence that their building occupies one of the choicest pieces of real estate in the city.
I have donated blood on occasion.
Beyond our Tampa experience, on the other end of the pipeline with my father-in-law, we learned all kinds of fun things about Texas nursing law thanks to the staff at UT Southwestern’s heart transplant program.
For instance, while statute drifts back and forth on the subject thanks to the whims of the legislature and how much money the lobbyists spend on either side of the issue, Texas law permits a nurse to have sex with a patient and collect from the estate/life insurance when said patient dies.
A doctor attempting the same thing would lose his/her license.
I stopped donating blood after I spent a couple years working as a components technician in the early 1990’s. I had to throw away too many unused units. My favorite part of that job was freezing the autologous units. It was interesting and felt good to know a specific person had planned ahead and was prepared.
I miss OFD and his frequent posts. I enjoyed his insights, even (perhaps especially) when I disagreed. Raising a G&T to OFD and absent friends.
Got news that University of the People accepted 33 of my requested transfer credits towards the elective portion of my bachelors for Computer Science. If I continue taking two classes at a time, I could be done in a year. My total out of pocket cost will be under $3,000. No loans. No grants. No scholarships. I’ll be the first person in my family with a college degree. That’s kind of cool.
I’ve been asked to consider a different role at my current employer. My experience for a production environment in that role is stale. I used to be pretty good at it. 14 years ago. The work in that role is my favorite aspect of IT. Both of the current folks in that role will be gone / retired by end of the year. It would be hard. Failing would suck. I’m sorely tempted. Husband shrugs and says we will deal if I fail and get fired.
Apropos our discussion here a week or so ago…
–several statements in the article suggest that the manufacturers and designers KNOW that they are not safe or effective.
I love my Speed Queen, and I use bleach too, and the warm water cycle.
n
@jenny, change can be good. However, you probably don’t want to inherit their problems, which might not be immediately visible. The other thing is ‘what happens if you don’t take the deal?’ will it affect you negatively to say no? Do you have a real choice?
n
@nick
All good points and things I’m considering this weekend. I believe I can decline without consequence.
One of the things Apple did with their money instead of buying Tesla.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3RjayAF0b4
SRSLY windows? 10% cpu load and my mouse still stutters? Pagefile using 100% of disk because 16 GIG of ram isn’t enough?
WTF in this day and age that the desktop ever visibly redraws, or mouse stutters. It’s ridiculous.
I am rebooting my office windows 7 x64 pc every two weeks because of this problem. The problem is mses.exe or something like that, windows defender. When it scans the hard drives every week, it never releases the file memory on certain files. After a few million files, your operating system memory is hosed. Or maybe it is Windows sentinel, i cannot remember. I have it do a deep scan every Friday night, takes days to scan 5 tb on my hard drives.
Got to father in laWS nursing home at 730pm. Hung with him until 9pm. Went to his house, the ac units were off and 91 f up, 86 f down. It is now 80 f upstairs. Getting up at 7am to start journey to Jerry’s World in Arlington, TX, the best football stadium in the world, for the 11am kickoff on cbs.
Hung with my cousin for a while while house cooling. He had 30+ people in his house playing poker. Very wild. Yes, he is single. We are taking his beloved Tesla to game. He was talking about his new software upgrade that he can now tell his Tesla to come pick him up.
Forgot my car cell charger. Somebody stole my travel cell charger out of my travel bag. Luckily the wife left a ancient charger here and it works.
I am rebooting my office windows 7 x64 pc every two weeks because of this problem. The problem is mses.exe or something like that, windows defender. When it scans the hard drives every week, it never releases the file memory on certain files. After a few million files, your operating system memory is hosed. Or maybe it is Windows sentinel, i cannot remember. I have it do a deep scan every Friday night, takes days to scan 5 tb on my hard drives.
I don’t believe Redmond is fixing bugs in Windows 7 beyond security problems. That has to be a career killer at this point, and only the “low hanging fruit” (for layoffs) staff the maintenance group.
I’ve also wondered if WHQL now lets minor annoyances slide in the Win7 tests in order to encourage upgrades.
Microsoft going all out to demonstrate that they are serious this time and really really mean it.
We’ll see. Windows 7 and 64 bit Python 2.x reach end of life in January together, and I doubt either one is really going away. Used together, in the right hands, a lot of productive work is possible, and Windows 7 once provided a predictable environment which Mac OS X, Linux or even Windows 10 does not match.
My Pop! OS experiment on my 2008 Mac Book Pro continues. The OS works ok, but I’ll eventally retire the machine to the laptop archive, kept in case I need to run Snow Leopard and/or my school projects.
He was talking about his new software upgrade that he can now tell his Tesla to come pick him up.
Did you try that at Jerry’s World?
The business manager (owner’s daughter … cough) at the AC service we just fired had a front job at Jerry’s World for a decade. In retrospect, I should have found someone else when she shared that story. I’m guessing that one don’t survive that long working for Jerry Jones without being really political in a way I find annoying in co-workers. Standards must be insanely high.
If I continue taking two classes at a time, I could be done in a year. My total out of pocket cost will be under $3,000. No loans.
@Jenny – congratulations on the accomplishment, both educational and financial.
One of the young’n’s I work with saddled her parents with co-signing on loans to one of the “best” engineering schools in the country. She makes adequate money to live in Austin working for us, but not adequate for living expenses and her debt burden which will probably never end. My guess is that it is around $200k after I went to the school’s web site and checked tuition/room/board estimates.
Of course she’s Prog. Robert Francis voter.
@Jenny – grats.
Look at Western Governor’s University for a Master’s if you are inclined that way, Flat rate tuition, most classes result in one or more industry certifications.