Cool-ish and damp.
I’ve got my normal monthly non-prepping hobby meeting this morning, followed by sportsball with the kid, and all the normal Saturday stuff too.
I’m jumping like a one legged paper hanger in a room full of rocking chairs. Or something.
SERIOUSLY FOLKS, get some preps in order. You do not want to be going out into crowds, fighting over the last roll of toilet paper in a few weeks when the WuFlu is all around us. TP doesn’t really go bad, so you’ll use it if nothing happens. Get some food in too, even if you have to put it in buckets and stack the buckets on the patio. Some way to cook it would be prudent too, if things really go to 7734. And water. Soap. Bleach. Wipes. If you don’t have masks I’d be checking old school neighborhood hardware stores, auto paint suppliers, equipment rental houses, walmart’s paint department, and other less common places, maybe even beauty supply houses. If you have accounts with industrial suppliers, you might check there too. CDC wants people to be thrifty with masks now in case they’re needed later- meaning there won’t be increasing supply.
Lots of good info in the keyword links. We’ve got a couple weeks while the doubling is still very small numbers. By the time you get “confirmation” that it’s here, it will be too late, like it’s already too late to get cheap masks. Think of it as insurance. Spend the time, effort, and money.
Take a hard look at your finances too. As the truth of this thing starts to sink in, there is NO WAY the current bubble won’t pop. Don’t get caught in a rush for the exit. If I’m wrong, get back in in a month. Don’t get greedy and hang in for those last few gains. Do some profit taking fer pete’s sake.
And – Keep stacking,
nick
Off on a SAMs run this morning to stock up. Mostly paper products as we didn’t bring those with us from the old house. I can store these in the attic or garage and not worry about spoilage. Also topping up food stores. The sale of our former home closed Friday so I have plenty of cash in reserve right now. And a couple hundred thousand in the ATMs if things really get bad. I don’t really expect things to go so far as loss of utilities. I have some water & a generator & gas camp stove but that would only last us for a couple of weeks tops.
..
The wife is getting better, she can get around with just a walker now not wheelchair bound. I hope she has turned the corner.
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I have to stop by the sheriff’s office this morning to file an “unauthorized use of vehicle” form. The car I loaned to the granddaughter was taken without permission by her brother while she is in jail. I should have gotten the title transferred last year but with the move and a sick wife it was low on my list. Now I am concerned that whatever he does with the car will blow back on me. This will mean revocation of his parole but not my problem and we are all better off without him on the streets. It’s terrible what drugs (heroin & meth) can do to good people.
CORONAVIRUS UPDATE
“China orders Wuhan to round up ALL suspected coronavirus patients and put them in quarantine camps as Beijing warns officials who run away from the ‘war’ will be ‘nailed to the pillar of historical shame.'”
Guh. Tell me about it. And a lot of clueless managers (to a first approximation, all managers) are really impressed by the “pull together this cool-kid language and this cool-kid database” proof of concept and decide that’s the way to go and put the cool kid in charge of a team, and then when the thing doesn’t scale well or the cool-kid language’s deficiencies are revealed, it’s always someone else’s fault. Or when the cool kid’s approach of pulling a few all-nighters doesn’t work for a making a solid, production-ready system — and it’s when it doesn’t work, not if — it’s never the cool kid’s fault. He’s brilliant! It must be someone else not measuring up.
Been there done that. The Kool Kid promised he and a team of 5 could replacE a half million line vax vms graphical database program at 18 months. I was brought in at 18 months and two weeks later the nightmare was somehow my fault.
SteveF, from yesterday:
Yep. Every project I ever had had a deadline of “yesterday”.
So happy to be retired.
Mammas don’t let your babies grow up to be programmers.
Been there done that. The Kool Kid promised he and a team of 5 could replacE a half million line vax vms graphical database program at 18 months. I was brought in at 18 months and two weeks later the nightmare was somehow my fault.
The place I talked to last week had the opposite problem. No Kool Kids flying on Red Bull, but they need someone from outside the organization to show up and enforce a modern methodology based on Git as well as spend time in the repository merging the disparate code bases from multiple acquisitions. Long term, they need to quit building embedded Linux systems from Cygwin (!) and drive all the developers to a single compile VM.
My role would essentially be Irritant. No one inside the organization wants to be that guy.
At this point, I’m not sure if my current gig is bad enough to make me want to jump into that situation. I’ve tried to avoid the over-40 QA/config management ghetto.
-cough- I’d be fine with it, assuming I had any power to make people follow the procedures that had been agreed to. This could include sitting between the development team and the boss and deciding whether his drop-everything-do-it-now report or feature is worth disrupting all other work.
One big problem in business is spineless low and middle managers in the engineering and software world. They’re fine giving direction so long as everyone’s nicey-nice lovey-dovey and some of them are good at bullying, but as soon as external pressure comes they collapse like worms.
My current team lead is like that. Over a year ago, after I’d done a lecture series on development approaches other than “chaos”, all developers and the prez had agreed on scrum cycles. (Spare me your poo-poos, anyone inclined to point out scrum’s deficiencies. It’s a massive improvement on what they’d been doing.) I don’t think we were a week into the first scrum sprint when the boss came along and said he needs this rush job for a meeting tomorrow morning. And it only got worse. The team dropped the pretense of prioritizing work and putting it into the sprint cycles a while ago and just allows the boss and the teams in the customer-facing positions to toss in work at any time with “today” deadlines. The only saving grace is that I wasn’t blamed for the failure to climb out of chaos; not sure how that happened.
One big problem in business is spineless low and middle managers in the engineering and software world. They’re fine giving direction so long as everyone’s nicey-nice lovey-dovey and some of them are good at bullying, but as soon as external pressure comes they collapse like worms.
I couldn’t get a read on the situation in only two hours. That’s concerning.
Where I currently work there are a lot of bullies above us, but I don’t depend on the job to eat so I push back. It would still suck to lose the job, however, because not having a job in hand means, at anyplace I apply, my resume would go straight into the “circular file” at my age.
Right now, I at least get a courtesy call/email.
“China orders Wuhan to round up ALL suspected coronavirus patients and put them in quarantine camps as Beijing warns officials who run away from the ‘war’ will be ‘nailed to the pillar of historical shame.’”
–someone remind me again how seasonal flu is worse? ‘cuz I don’t remember anyone being rounded up and interred for having flu or living with someone who has flu. And where exactly are they supposed to be taken? 35K admitted to be sick. Multiply by four for gramma, wife, kid, and Uncle Zho. That’s a lot of people to feed, and a lot of asses to wipe. Who’s going to do that work at a PLAGUE HOSPITAL?
Sweet jebus this looks bad for china, and probably the world. Consider the places china has a large worker presence that we haven’t seen one single case from yet- africa, central and south america…. consider INDIA. They’ve got money and jobs in the US and the UK.
61 people sick on a cruise ship from ONE 80yo guy? That’s nuts.
n
Bioweapon which got loose. That’s what I’d put my money on if there were a betting pool on the cause of this outbreak. (There probably is, but I don’t know of it and am not interested enough to look.)
Wait, what? I thought this was a white male american problem–
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7981285/Soldier-armed-rifle-kills-12-Thailand.html
–super long reload times today.
–I guess this is why we haven’t seen any cases in africa–
Been there done that. The Kool Kid promised he and a team of 5 could replacE a half million line vax vms graphical database program at 18 months. I was brought in at 18 months and two weeks later the nightmare was somehow my fault.
Btw, I came back from lunch one day and the Kool Kid was sitting at his desk crying. I closed his door to give him a little privacy. The client had been to visit him for a project update and reamed him a new hole back there. The Kool Kid kept on promising 10X what he could deliver and ended up delivering nothing. It was demoralizing and horrible and cost us the client.
The Kool Kid had 45 people working for him at one point, I never could figure out what they were all doing. The Peter Principle and the Mythical Man Month all at once.
It was 34 F Thursday night and 75 F Friday. It only got to 45 F last night and we are back up to 80 F.
The move is crazy. The wife found the daughter’s roku box in her closet. I had been searching all over the daughter’s space. The roku box on the den tv fried itself when I turned it on, just the video I guess. I am trying to decide whether to send it back since our passwords are embedded in it.
Btw, I came back from lunch one day and the Kool Kid was sitting at his desk crying. I closed his door to give him a little privacy. The client had been to visit him for a project update and reamed him a new hole back there. The Kool Kid kept on promising 10X what he could deliver and ended up delivering nothing. It was demoralizing and horrible and cost us the client.
The customer for my current project has former execs and leads from my employer on the payroll. The expertise is utilized to come up with new excuses not to pay us. I’m sure that results in some tears, but we don’t see it from management right now at my level.
The move is crazy. The wife found the daughter’s roku box in her closet. I had been searching all over the daughter’s space. The roku box on the den tv fried itself when I turned it on, just the video I guess. I am trying to decide whether to send it back since our passwords are embedded in it.
The Roku doesn’t have the “reset” button on the back? All of mine have it, but I don’t have the smallest models which are just a HDMI plug and USB power socket.
Toss it and get a new one. You can get a 4K model for $29.95 at Walmart.
I hit Home Depot and Lowes for project materials this afternoon.
NO face masks at all. Both did have half face respirators, with replaceable cartridges. They didn’t have many cartridges but did have some prefilters. $4 / wear after paying for the respirator body. Note that HD had a few, Lowes had a table display with a couple dozen.
That was it.
Still had tyvek and bleach.
n
RIP Robert Conrad. I loved the WWW. Will Smith as the Hip Hop version ruined it. Just like his Hip Hop I Robot ruined it.
Ditto. We also enjoyed him as Pappy Boyington in the Black Sheep.
Both great shows.
n
One last thought before bed,
Coronavirus ‘Super-Spreader’ Infects 57 In Hospital As China Continues To Refuse CDC Help
The incident was a chilling reminder of the “super-spreaders” in outbreaks of other coronavirus diseases, SARS and MERS…
Superspreaders.
FFS.
n
“AI picks Buttigieg ‘the candidate to beat Trump’”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/ai-picks-buttigieg-the-candidate-to-beat-trump
Every time I see his name I think butt ranger.
Hat tip to:
https://drudgereport.com/
I have a mid ‘70s stereo system with five speakers. Whenever I move into a new house I install it and route the wires into the walls and either above the ceiling or under the floor to reach the rear speakers. I asked my son to give me a hand with this today (I recently moved near him) and he suggested I use Bluetooth to avoid doing this.
Googling this (I used DuckDuckGo) I found I need Bluetooth transmitters and receivers (probably one for each speaker) and then would have to pair (connect them). The resulting sound quality should be good enough for my old ears.
My question is: would I have to pair them every time I turn the stereo on? My experience with pairing Bluetooth devices has been very poor. All too often I cannot. Since I often use the stereo intermittently all day long (turn it on and off several times in a day) then I would have to have the hassle of pairing them each time. Or could I pair them and leave them on – would they stay paired- even though I’ve turned the stereo off.
Another issue is powering the speakers. My stereo will drive five 100 Watt speakers. The Bluetooth links I found don’t appear to support anything close to this. So I will also need two powered speakers. Maybe I could pick up a good-enough stereo at Goodwill to power the rear speakers.
Anyone have any suggestions about this?
If you’re happy with it, stick with it. If you’re not, replace the whole lot in one go – it’ll be a lot less effort than trying to get 40+yo kit to talk to new stuff. It would also sound very, very different; modern amps with old speakers is a difficult thing to match well (yes, fine, throw in EQ, calibrated mics for set up, etc – another huge can of worms).
You only have to run the cables once, whereas my experience of modern HiFi is that you get to swear at it frequently.
The Apple HomePod connects with WiFi, not Bluetooth. And you can have more than one.
Ditto. We also enjoyed him as Pappy Boyington in the Black Sheep.
Also G. Gordon Liddy in the TV movie version of “Will”.
“Black Sheep Squadron” is back in syndication on “H&I”, one of those networks which sit on the .2/.3/.4/… channels of broadcast TV. It is an interesting (brief — two season) slice of 70s TV since a bunch of stars had their first recurring roles in the series.
The Museum of Flight in Seattle has the Pappy Boyington statue which was commissioned for UW’s Engineering Department. Despite being one of the university’s most famous graduates and only ace, the Japanese student association successfully petitioned against the statue’s installation … 20 (?) years ago.
Not much resemblence to Robert Conrad. 🙂
@robert – I have always run the wire to the rears. Last year was the first time I had a system and a room where I couldn’t do so, but the customer did all the research and chose his own wireless solution, I think based on a Sonos product. Sonos is pretty high end integration and home automation. I can’t imagine having to re-pair every time. My suspicion is that the speaker makers don’t use pure blutooth, but do use the frequencies. Wireless subwoofers are very common, and only need pairing once.
As far as Goodwill for sourcing, it will depend entirely on your area. I find a lot of early 90s AV receiver/amps, but not much more current. I find something nice and vintage about every other month locally. Ebay is a better bet if you like 70s-80s japanese electronics….
In most modern systems the rears and sides don’t need huge power levels because the program material isn’t “full sound” like typical music. So they economize.
nick