Much cooler here!
Not a bad flight. Made it without drama. TSA wasn’t bad. I recommend traveling with a small child to avoid TSA hassles.
I haven’t seen any news, so I got nothing new… But I’m confident political drama continues.
Keep stacking, it isn’t getting better until out gets a lot worse.
N
I have gotten TSA Pre-check on my last several flights. Getting that designation has a lot to do with my frequent flyer status. Generally fairly easy to get through without having to remove shoes, remove belts, or take laptops out of the bag. Fairly quick process using my passport cards. Last trip the TSA check took only 15 minutes at Nashville.
What I don’t like, and cannot control, is the rummaging through the luggage. That happened both ways on my last round trip. I know because my stuff was rearranged. Nothing was left in the bags for TSA to steal on purpose. Every trip I have taken to Europe I bring gifts for our host. Without exception something has been stolen from the luggage. I am fairly certain that was done in the USA by TSA. Nothing exceptionally valuable, just embarrassing to arrive at the hosts place only to have to explain that their gift was stolen.
What I don’t like, and cannot control, is the rummaging through the luggage. That happened both ways on my last round trip. I know because my stuff was rearranged.
The TSA has sticky fingers in Tampa and Orlando and, at a minimum, they will go through your luggage. Keep that in mind for your Disney trip. That long line and suggested 2 hour early arrival at OIA isn’t an accident.
In Tampa, the stealing -er- screening goes faster since they have a complete building to themselves due east of the main airport building on what used to be intended as the site of a train station. The mucky mucks in Tampa will not let a train go to the airport directly from Orlando for at least a generation so that’s where the heavy-duty automated and manual screening happens since not long after 9/11. Or used to, at least, out of sight of the public.
Eventually, Florida will link all five of the state’s international airports by light/heavy rail, but I doubt we’ll see more than two directly linked (Orlando and Fort Lauderdale, currently under construction) in my lifetime. The only barriers left are political, but those will be the toughest to crack.
Party today. Lots of relatives. Stress level for the females is RED, shading toward violet. I don’t get it. Probably never will. Despite that, energy is currently being expended on all sorts of trivial and non essential tasks, like loading the dishwasher.
N
Driving to Orlando. With plenty of quarters to use for the highway toll robbers.
I guess Comrade Bernie is trying to set a benchmark as the feeble, heart attack candidate. I might watch the next debate just to see how he holds up. Drop out already. How many more millions is he going to waste on being non-electable.
Do you rent them? A business opportunity!
I imagine people would GLADLY give you their small child for a week. 🙂
I think that is already being done at the southern border.
Bada bing!
Jeez, you’d think this was a wake, and not a fun Irish one.
Foods good though.
N
All the forgotten hits of the 70S!
N
Jeez, you’d think this was a wake, and not a fun Irish one.
Foods good though.
It has been my experience that the food at all wakes is good. Lots of casseroles. Very bad for you though.
My ISP. Sheesh…. I had a zippy 25/5 connection with bursts to 35/8. No complaints there.
About late June, early July, a couple of small tornadoes ripped up some of their hardware. So on top of the usual dealing with idiot customers, they have had the added fun of rebuilding half of the network.
Then they “tweaked” radio settings. The tweaking also affected my neighbor.
So now I get /maybe/ 5/1. Usually about 7, maybe 12 down. Neighbor gets a bit faster. It is interference.
Somehow this is my fault because I have a pair of Nanobeams in bridge mode on the 5gb band. And I’m violating some unknown Terms of Service thing for having anything on the 5gb band. Yeah, missed that part of the never presented TOS bull stuff.
Suddenly and somehow my Nanobeam bridge, where I never changed any default settings other than IP address and password, is the problem and “stepping on the frequencies”. Never mind it’s all on default settings and it all worked…. for almost 4 years. With the old wISP and then the new wISP. Until the new wISP tweaked their settings.
Hey, I’m out in the middle of oh, well, heck, the nearest neighbor is 1500 feet away and lots of trees between us. And yeah, I know it is 1000 feet from house to the cattle guard at the property line. Me and my handy tape measure know it is so.
Ok, I can work on this. I changed channel width to 20 from 80 Mhz. I moved freq to 5835 because by my understanding, the higher the – dB number, the better. Like channel separation on stereo amps.
I’ve re-aimed one radio. Yeah, it was off almost a quarter inch. I cranked the power down to 3db from 4db. Why 4db? It worked and the default setting made the radios toasty. I may turn the power lower. … 3db power seems as fast at 4db power.
Ok. I can’t talk to the radio on the WAN side. I can look at site survey frome my hardware and guess what? Ain’t nothing showing but my hardware. Maybe because my hardware is in bridge mode? But that makes no sense from what I have read.
Maybe if I kicked my power levels up from 4dB to full blast I’ll be able to see the ISP’s radio. I doubt it.
Just kind of loopy from reading about this stuff.
But my bridge talks to itself at 60 to 120 Mb. That’s fine, my ‘net connection is 25Mb, the various Squeeze Boxes run at 10Mb, maybe.
And yeah, I DO have have a clump of brush around a baby oak tree right in the middle and this year the grape vines went nuts. Never mind the poison ivy. When it it cools off I can clear that mess out and go back to the radios chatting at each other at 300 Mb.
Wow, 55 F next Friday night. We may be turning on the heaters !
https://www.wunderground.com/forecast/us/tx/sugar%20land/77469
Throwback to Thursday as I’ve had the crud since then…
A few years (decades) ago I worked for an Electricity company in the UK during a summer vacation. My first project was formatting an MIS department document to print on the backup bill printer. IIRC it was 8 pages per second. Paper came out of the printer about 8 feet up, and down into a hopper. You can imagine how much paper was wasted printing a single page.
The main printer was 12 pages per second. It was at another location and I never saw it. Both were monsters.
“Trump Cuts Loose on Mitt Romney: He is a ‘Pompous Ass’ Who ‘Choked’ and ‘So Bad for R’s!’”
https://www.mediaite.com/politics/trump-cuts-loose-on-mitt-romney-he-is-a-pompous-ass-who-choked-and-so-bad-for-rs/
Trump is right !
Hat tip to:
https://drudgereport.com/
“@Aoc follower goes berserk in town hall. Claims we “have to eat babies” to survive climate change”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/10/03/aoc-follower-goes-berserk-in-town-hall-claims-we-have-to-eat-babies-to-survive-climate-change/
Something is wrong with these people. Sacrificing babies (and eating them !) is obviously severe mental illness.
Hat tip to:
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2019/10/04/the-perilous-passage/
“I think we’re going to see brief, unimaginably violent outbreaks. Most of them will be — have been, and not that violent — in leftist dominated cities, which means it’s mostly theater, with few exceptions. But as the crazy bullshit impeachment has shown, they’re getting more than a little crazy. And that’s on top the Thunberg thing, which is even more insane (since when do we take 16 year olds seriously, when they demand we kill most of the population of the world?) In fact, this chick right here is the current poster child for the left. The scary part being that other than saying it in public, she’s not that unusual, even. Even though she is quite obviously mentally ill.”
_NEO: Near Earth Objects: The New Frontiers Series, Book 3_ by Jack L Knapp
https://www.amazon.com/NEO-Near-Earth-Objects-Frontiers/dp/1073559149/?tag=ttgnet-20
Book number three of a six book space opera series. I read the well printed and bound POD (print on demand) trade paperback self published by the author. I have ordered book four from Big River.
Wow, great story. An older engineer buys a bunch of Nikola Tesla’s journals in an old chest and spots a design for an “electric impeller” that was never built. He built a working version of the electric impeller after many restarts and has a electric propulsion device. The story is about the usage of the electric impellers to build space ships, a moon base, and various peoples and countries trying to steal the design.
This book is specifically about finding alien artifacts throughout the Solar System. And then the aliens show up and drag six huge asteroids into unstable orbits around Earth. Not good.
The writing of the story is a little bit rough so I am deducting a half point for that. A little more editing would have been good. But for me, the story is always the most important thing. I will read this story again some day so that makes it a five star book.
BTW, this is not the first time that a story has been written similar to this. Many stories have “magical” engines for space drives. A very similar book is John Varley’s most excellent _Red Thunder_ which uses the squeezer drive. The reason why I like these stories so much is that it is not just the new drive device, it is also the design and work to build the container around the new device.
My rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.3 out of 5 stars (15 reviews)
BTW, I failed to mention how much the series so far reminds me of a Heinlein juvenile. Just not as well written as a Heinlein.
I just finished Peter Grant’s “Forge a New Blade”. I basically like his writing, but after reading several of his novels I am also tired of it. It’s just too formulaic: the good guys trip across unending sources of funding, thrash the bad guys, then go on to build their own private space fleets to do good throughout the galaxy. This novel does try to mix things up a bit: the bad guys are actually a mixed bunch, which makes things somewhat more interesting.
Meanwhile, Weber has come out with the 10th novel in his Safehold series (remember Nimue?). I’ve just started that, but so far it’s as good as the rest of the series.
– – – – –
Also on the fiction front: the impeachment saga. Over here, it’s like a bad soap opera, where everything is so ridiculous that you wonder why they made the program. I mean, some minimal level of believability is essential to a good story. This is so absurd that it’s more like Monty Python: only to be enjoyed with (a lot of) beer.
What? It’s actually reality? Hard to comprehend…
We turned the furnace on Saturday evening. Projected lows around 35F. I didn’t check how cold it got but my van’s windshield had a thick layer of frost at 0800 Sunday.
I started reading it on Lynn’s recommendation. Currently (checks Kindle) 7% of the way into the first volume.
The New Frontiers Series
I started reading it on Lynn’s recommendation. Currently (checks Kindle) 7% of the way into the first volume.
Hope you like it.