cool, wet. [39F and 99%RH but sunny and bright]
Yesterday was nice once it warmed up a bit, but it got cold again in the afternoon. Clear sunny day though.
Well, I didn’t buy anything at the Needville estate. The laser pre-sold. The CNC router was lighter weight that I thought, and $1500. Most of the other tool and outdoor stuff was priced very reasonably, even crazy cheap… But still too rich for my blood. The indoor stuff was HIGH. The ham gear (vintage Heathkit) was immaculate, but priced like it was dipped in gold.
The only thing I saw inside that was reasonable was a pair of bose 301 series III speakers. They were $175 and they sell for about half again more on ebay. Not enough room for a reseller, but if you were looking for a pair, they were a nice discount. The guy collected trains, clocks, machine tools, hobby and craft stuff, and a bunch of collectibles, and all I could find was a couple of books for my post-apoc library. Even they were overpriced at $5, $3, and $3. There was one little slide rule I’m hoping to flip for my gas money. And that’s it.
I did pickup some auction items and previewed next week’s sale. A nice spam can of 7.62, and an ammo can of mystery rounds. I’ll be a bidder. Also got an Aquatainer at a thrift store I couldn’t resist shopping while I was driving by. Can’t have too much water storage.
Didn’t get the plants in the ground this week. Maybe Sunday. Harvested the one orange but haven’t eaten it yet. Still getting nice sweet peppers though. Lemons should be good in a week’s time, maybe sooner. This year I’ll do the fall pruning on the grapevines and see how that helps.
My pile of stuff is starting to get bids in the local auction, so that’s good. Just need to get another load or two over there.
So much to do. And I’ll be spending a few hours today watching musical theatre, with the wife and kids. “Free” tickets. All they cost is your life…. (cue maniacal laughter…..)
I’ve heard some good progress in comments this week. Keep stacking.
n
“asian” teen shooter story is a full third of the way down the page, maybe closer to half…
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7691207/Teen-gunman-Santa-Clarita-shooting-six-guns-home-counted-rounds-shot-5.html
n
.45 caliber semi-automatic rifle in his backpack?
An inaccurate story from a tabloid?
I’m shocked!
Well, I didn’t buy anything at the Needville estate. The laser pre-sold. The CNC router was lighter weight that I thought, and $1500. Most of the other tool and outdoor stuff was priced very reasonably, even crazy cheap… But still too rich for my blood. The indoor stuff was HIGH. The ham gear (vintage Heathkit) was immaculate, but priced like it was dipped in gold.
Houston doesn’t have anything similar to Dallas Maker Space?
I attended a Hack-a-Day presentation at DMS a few years ago, shortly after they built a pretty cool laser cutter. IIRC, the arrangement is that you pay a membership fee and can access the high end toys after attending a training session.
The scary/cool presentation featuring the laser cutter was about drones cut/folded from single pieces of foam and fully equipped with remote phone app control for a total cost of $100, mostly parts. Multiple mile flight range.
Crash the drone? Pull out the parts and cut a new piece of foam.
I had to take one of my kids over to the H1B neighborhood’s middle school this morning for an academic competition. That facility is a huge upgrade from the middle school for my neighborhood, same ISD but within the city limits of Austin.
Gotta check for any secret bond issue elections. Honestly, the only way I found out about the last PAC and stadium vote in time to vote ‘no’ was that the polling location is in a prominent place on the main road in and out of my neighborhood.
Austin/Travis County is the third world anymore.
Christmas Rules
1. Don’t go into debt trying to show people how much you love them.
2. Don’t go visit your family if it compromises your mental health.
3. If someone comments on your weight … Eat them.
“Calls for AG Barr’s Impeachment Intensify After ‘Lunatic Authoritarian’ Federalist Society Speech”
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/calls-for-ag-barrs-impeachment-intensify-after-lunatic-authoritarian-federalist-society-speech/
We are heading for a civil war in this country at this rate. I just don’t see how we can reconcile our differences. And most of those differences are related to illegal aliens. And excessive legal aliens allowed to immigrate here without us needing them (the immigration lottery).
Hat tip to:
https://drudgereport.com/
3. If someone comments on your weight … Eat them.
A couple of weeks ago, during one of his podcasts, I heard Dennis Miller speculate if the Donner Party had a sommelier.
I made a bit of a mess in my cube trying to keep soda from spewing out my nose, once again mystifying all the snowflakes around me.
Came back from working on moms estate in California with a box of treasure.
And a fresh appreciation for firefighters. How they walk with their cojones is a great mystery. The Kincade Fire in Sonoma County should have taken out Healdsburg, Windsor, and marched to the ocean. It was held back by sheer determination and ridiculous courage of aforementioned undoubtedly well endowed firefighters. The fire maps are shocking and don’t come close to telling the story.
Anyway. Treasure.
I have about 20 developed reels of Super 8 from the early 1970’s to get converted to digital. I recognize our distinctive childhood canvas tent in one frame.
I also have an UNDEVELOPED Super 8 cartridge.
Checking the intertubes for places that can handle it in house. May be a shocking waste of cash but I’d like to try. I don’t remember much detail from my early years and I’d love to see if the film jogs memories.
Have any of you find gentlemen had luck concerting old film to digital? Not interested in doing it myself but see that I could if I wish.
Reliability and quality is of greater concern than cost.
My older brother acquired several reels of 8mm film from the early ‘50s when my parents died. Lot of film from Disneyland which is basically worthless. Lot of film of my cousins. Some film of myself and my two siblings.
I don’t know where my brother had the film converted to DVD.
I used a video editor to mash up the stuff that was important to me. Other than that nothing done with the stuff. When I die so will the material as it has no meaning to my son. He would not recognize me or the others.
Same thing basically happened when my aunt died. I went through all the pictures and tossed most of them. Even though the pictures were labeled I had no idea who these people were. Saved a few I knew, scanned them into digital to include a document.
This document was written by my grandfather’s brother. A family history. Starts before Utah was a state up until shortly after I was born. Some interesting stuff. Done on a manual typewriter. I scanned in, OCRed the result, then manually fixed the scanning errors. A tedious process. The grammar errors, misspellings, and politically incorrect stuff with much use of the word nigger and other racial references. To change that would remove the character of the time and the document. But that will also die with my generation.
Have any of you find gentlemen had luck concerting old film to digital? Not interested in doing it myself but see that I could if I wish.
Rush Limbaugh advertises the services of LegacyBox. I have no experience with them. I have scanned about a hundred old pictures which is a total pain in the rump.
https://legacybox.com/collections/film-transfer-service
“The truth about ending enslaving debt” By Harold Pease, Ph. D
https://www.greensburgdailynews.com/opinion/columns/the-truth-about-ending-enslaving-debt/article_fcf96e50-063f-11ea-b271-1b1d85d7fec3.html
“Both major political parties had the power to control or end enslaving national debt the last 50 years. Both failed. Neither even try anymore. Neither party had the guts to say no to gifting and now offer only more debt on our defenseless children and grandchildren. The hard truth is, there will be no Social Security for the children of today. The present path offers only loss of liberty and bankruptcy.”
“Our national debt exceeds 23 trillion dollars. To pay this debt today each taxpayer owes $186,578, immediately. Our largest creditors in order are: Medicare/Medicaid $1,253,523,000,000, Social Security $1,044,752,000,000, Defense/War 673,433,000,000, Income Security (welfare) $301,114,000,000, Net Interest on Debt $374,060,000,000, Federal Pensions $287,602,000,000, and Food / Agricultural Subsidies $151,840,000,000 (USDebtClock.org).”
He is correct. If we don’t have a civil war first in the USA then we will have a financial apocalypse in the next 15 to 20 years.
Personally, I am carrying too much debt. About 25% of my gross worth at the present value of real properties. I will sell off one of the properties after the new year and reduce my debt by 25%.
I replaced the ignition switch in the side by side today. It would have been easier if the switch mounted a half inch higher or lower. There’s a brace for the steering column “right there”.
Anyway. Done. No blood. With the headlight switch On, turning the ignition switch to On turns the lights on…. no jiggling of the key needed.
It was wonky when we bought it and gradually became worse. Now I wait to see if the battery holds a charge.
There are several. They aren’t cheap. The cheapest are about $50/month.
“German parliament approves climate protection plan”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/11/16/german-parliament-approves-climate-protection-plan/
Well, looks like we will not have to compete with Germany very much in the future.
Of course, as Germany transforms into an islamic state in the next two generations, they will walk this back.
Old pictures…
One of my sisters sent me a large box of old photos. Some for me, some for our brother. All neat and sorted into a pile for each.
It’s pretty weird to casually flip through and there are no pictures of either sister. It’s all in a tub under the bed. I might take a closer look this Winter. Might just toss it all into the trash. He doesn’t care about old photos and if I keep them it’s just one more thing to be tossed out when I croak.
“Claim: Climate Change is Causing Arctic Blasts to Become Less Severe”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/11/15/claim-climate-change-causing-arctic-blasts-to-become-less-severe/
“They can fiddle the temperature record, build dodgy reconstructions and they can hide declines all they want, but the one thing they cannot do is conceal evidence of extreme cold weather right in front of people’s eyes.”
And the weather in the last week was extreme. Very unusual to have freezing weather in south Texas in the second week of November.
The editorial cartoon is worth the visit.
It’s pretty weird to casually flip through and there are no pictures of either sister. It’s all in a tub under the bed. I might take a closer look this Winter. Might just toss it all into the trash. He doesn’t care about old photos and if I keep them it’s just one more thing to be tossed out when I croak.
So they kept all the pictures with them in them ?
Clever Gates…but probable maintenance nightmare
While going thru my dad’s things, and getting the house ready to sell, my sister went thru all the pix, boxes and boxes, and pulled every one of her she didn’t like. Culled others based on some private criterion, and then walked away.
I’ve got rolls of 8mm and super8 too. I grabbed them and a projector as I left mom’s house. I remember hours of splicing short reels into longer with my mom at the kitchen table. I carried that fukcing camera bag everywhere on our trips. I refuse to carry a camera that needs a bag. I will put my little point and shoot in a belt pouch at disneyworld. It has carl zeiss glass and takes good pix of the kids. Candids. Phone cams take good posed shots. Glass and distance is needed for candids. I loved getting shots with my wife’s big digital and a big piece of glass…. but I won’t carry the beast.
n
@nightraker, those gates were pretty cool. I spent a couple hours some months ago watching the channel of a company that installs gates made of those bollards that sink into the ground to open, very similar to the pipe fence in the linked vid.
Most of those gates are protecting houses in some shitty places.
Every driveway in shanghai had a gate and attendants. The gates were similar manual things that expanded out across the opening.
n
And the weather in the last week was extreme. Very unusual to have freezing weather in south Texas in the second week of November.
This November is similar to our first in Texas, back in 2014. We got grief from people in Vantucky that Fall since the temps in Portland were mild that Winter, and my “it” moment about leaving Portland involved 4-6 inches of snow on the ground the first week of December.
I thought those were the most handsome but I’d like to see the provisions for drainage and freeze/thaw. Obviously expen$ive.
The spring loaded cattle guard the pickup drove over was nice, too. Big springs though and I wonder about scraping the underside of the truck.
If I lived in the country, I’d be looking at how I could secure the road into my property. I’m thinking about stuff like digging long slots in the road, and putting a log in it, with one end angled up and about 2 ft above the road surface, like a pike pointing out.
I picked out the trees to chainsaw and drop across some of the access to my neighborhood, should limiting vehicle traffic become desirable. Limb them selectively so they can’t be rolled….
I gated my driveway to hide the pallets of “inventory” there. Nice looking steel (iron) swing gate, with wooden pickets between the steel to block the view. Still need to do some work to finish it. Like so many projects around here….
I’ve played with gate designs in my mind for years, and finally settled on a cantilever rolling design. I like the idea of sliding (rolling) over swinging for my application, but never liked the maintenance problems of a track across the driveway. The cantilever IS tougher to build, but if done right can look good and be low maintenance. Power is by an enclosed rack and pinion, with everything hidden in a gatehouse.
Triggered!
https://www.dailywire.com/news/chick-fil-a-food-truck-triggers-oregon-students-sparks-walkout?utm_source=cnemail&utm_medium=email&utm_content=111519-news&utm_campaign=position1
I don’t miss Oregon. West Linn is where ODOT is planning to put one of two pilot toll plazas, a first for the Interstate system and an experiment which will eventually lead to plazas on all the freeway miles around Portland.
I’m not sure what the h*ll is wrong with a lot of the people in WA and OR, regulars here excluded. When we lived there, it seemed like the most hated political activist in WA State is the leader of the campaign which, once again, won a rollback of car tab fees to $30.
So they kept all the pictures with them in them ?
Yes. Perhaps as an insult?
The video of gates was interesting.
The gates that solve the problem of opening up hill are pretty cool.
n