Hot and humid, possibly some more rain.
Yesterday was hot and humid until it was cooler and humid, then finally we got some more rain. Oddly it seemed warmer with the rain.
We did get some nice sun during the day.
I still wasn’t feeling 100%, between back pain and ‘weather knee’ so I didn’t do much. Did manage some more work in the garage, and I can see progress, just less and more slowly than I’d like.
Pulled some bike parts out of thin air to keep my wife’s project moving along, and yet no connection between doing that and having all the stuff hanging around. Hmmm.
Had some fun with the archery stuff in the evening. Youth bows and practice arrows mean you can have fun in a much smaller space. And given the number of arrows in the returned merch for sale in our local amazon returns auction, I’m not the only one who thought archery would be a good way to pass the time during the isolation.
Did a quick check of the gardens and fruit trees. Picked and ate a small handful of blueberries with Kid2. Some of the small ones were really sweet and delicious.
Dinner was a prepper fail. It was supposed to be pork ribs on the grill. But, time got away from me and the ribs were in the fridge too long. Vac seal was good, but they smelled bad. I hated throwing them away, but there was no way I could justify the risk of eating them. I kept meaning to seal and freeze them, but didn’t and suddenly it was 3 weeks later. So we ate sausage and red beans and rice. Frozen kielbasa, Knorr side dish rb&r… It was good. Meat was a bit spicy, and the rb&r were not. Kids prefer less spicy.
Today I’ll be headed over to my client’s house again. We had a big storm and he’s got gear that isn’t working. I think we lost his DSL modem, and possibly the network switch, and at least one of the patio TVs. I’ll know better later.
And I’ll keep chipping away at the projects.
Keep stacking.
nick
Today I’ll be headed over to my client’s house again. We had a big storm and he’s got gear that isn’t working. I think we lost his DSL modem, and possibly the network switch, and at least one of the patio TVs. I’ll know better later.
I lost a first gen TiVo to lighting back when we had one connected to the analog phone line. Surge came through that connection and got past the Belkin varistor.
Of course, the 40 year old Princess phone plugged into the same jack still works today whereas the first gen TiVo would be useless post HDTV switchover and cable systems ditching analog. Interestingly, Sony had the TiVos assembled somewhere here in the US, even the circuit board.
AT&T didn’t start laying fiber until they broke the union in 2009. They even dug up a bunch of fiber SNET laid in CT prior to that acquisition, and now legacy SNET is part of bankrupt Frontier.
I’m not really in need of another car but I might look anyway
Where you can find Hertz cars at huge discounts
https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/where-you-can-buy-hertz-cars-huge-discounts
You can’t make this stuff up:
Beyond the locker room: Coronavirus isolation is an opportunity to teach boys about toxic masculinity
I’m not really in need of another car but I might look anyway.
Where you can find Hertz cars at huge discounts
This came up the other day. The numbers posted on the web site as of the bankruptcy filing last week were not that great, and I doubt anyone is in the office in Fort Myers this week.
I bet I could find a 2019 Versa at a dealership new for $10k, without 40,000 miles on the CVT. 11k, easily.
Resorts out on Sanibel and Captiva, just off Fort Myers, reopened earlier this month. Locals are going to take advantage of the deals.
https://tween-waters.com/beach-cam/
Sweet jebus, “masculinity scholar”. Wood chippers. Industrial sized wood chippers.
I guess we can be grateful he didn’t co-opt Memorial Day for his message.
n
We’re probably looking at a new car next year. Given our solar installation on the new house, we’ll probably go electric. VW is coming out with a new car later this year (ID.4) that sounds promising. The all-wheel drive is one of the key features, given winters in the mountains. I hope we can tow with it – that seems to be a problem with lots of electric vehicles. Not sure why…
Student project time – I listened to seven student presentations this afternoon. With COVID, this was done remotely. One student got lazy and figured I wouldn’t notice that he was literally reading his presentation. Sorry, guy, it was obvious. I opened up his final paper, searched to find where he was, and started reading along just to be sure. Yesterday, I downloaded 2o-some programming projects that also need graded. I love teaching, but grading is definitely not the fun part…
Sweet jebus, “masculinity scholar”. Wood chippers. Industrial sized wood chippers.
That’s not new. One upside of the virus is that a lot of budget culling is coming for the nonsense in education. Austin will be ugly around the capital next Spring with sit-ins, demonstrations, and much wailing as the oxes are gored.
With the downturn in the food service industry, where will all the unemployed “academics” find work?
n
With the downturn in the food service industry, where will all the unemployed “academics” find work?
Whoever said that they want to “work” as most people define the word?
That will be the real employment problem climbing out of the hole we’ve dug in the economy over the last two months.
UT Austin – as an alumnus I got some begging mail from the alumni organization a few years ago. I don’t remember the details, except that it was all about supporting the prog agenda. I told them what I thought about that brand of politics. Oddly, I haven’t heard from them since…
I think it largely has to do with the structure of the vehicle and not the propulsion system. Towing puts a lot of strain on the chassis. Vehicles with towing capacities above a couple thousand pounds all have frames. The frame is supporting the torque and other forces involved. Thin unibodies are not up to the task and will warp or bed.
All the electric vehicles I have seen all have unibodies. Makes them lighter and easier to place the batteries and control electronics. I suspect that Tesla’s electric truck has a frame and thus will be able to tow more than a couple thousand pounds. I highly doubt they will ever reach the 30 thousand pounds available towing from some pickups.
All the electric vehicles I have seen all have unibodies. Makes them lighter and easier to place the batteries and control electronics. I suspect that Tesla’s electric truck has a frame and thus will be able to tow more than a couple thousand pounds. I highly doubt they will ever reach the 30 thousand pounds available towing from some pickups.
The Cybertruck is unibody. At the rollout, The Real Life Tony Stark (TM) claimed that the traditional truck body on frame design resulted in a lot of “useless” weight, and, to emphasize the point, showed a video of a contrived “tow off” between the Cybertruck and an F150 of uspecified trim level.
Jenny, thanks for the comments and links about your town’s Memorial Day service yesterday. It is a beautiful omen when people spontaneously come together for a patriotic event like that.
One of my grandmothers was a telephone operator from way back. She got a Princess phone as soon as they came out… she was so proud of it!
Re Frontier: we keep a landline partly because Frontier is the best of a bad lot of internet options for us, and while they claim people get ‘as good’ service without having the landline service too, we have found Frontier to be ….disingenuous to say the least.. about their service quality. We miss Verizon.
CDC’s official word on antibody tests
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/lab/resources/antibody-tests-guidelines.htm
n
Dinner was a prepper fail. It was supposed to be pork ribs on the grill. But, time got away from me and the ribs were in the fridge too long. Vac seal was good, but they smelled bad. I hated throwing them away, but there was no way I could justify the risk of eating them. I kept meaning to seal and freeze them, but didn’t and suddenly it was 3 weeks later. So we ate sausage and red beans and rice. Frozen kielbasa, Knorr side dish rb&r… It was good. Meat was a bit spicy, and the rb&r were not. Kids prefer less spicy.
I went out to HEB yesterday and bought 1.5 lbs of Texas gulf shrimp. I sauteed them with onion powder and lemon pepper and then cooked them in the skillet. They were awesome ! All that lemon pepper got me to sweating even. I will do this again.
I even washed the spices off a dozen and gave them to the wife. She tried the first without the wash and just about died.
Those “tow off” events are no indication of any vehicles power or towing ability. It is a test of traction. It is a meaningless test. My old 31 HP Ford 600 tractor (2,000 pounds added weight in the back, 1,000 pounds added weight in the front) could take any F-150 today, of any trim level, and drag it around the parking lot or grassy field without any issue and probably a lot of the F-250’s even with 4WD in any of them. It is gearing, traction, torque and how it is applied that makes the difference.
I would not want to tow with any unibody vehicle. Yes, it is supposed to made of a different steel. But towing results in a lot of flexing on the frame and a lot of stress at the attachment points. Getting that stress onto a steel frame, to which the drive train is attached and that body just sort of sits on the frame removes the stress from the body. Until I see Tesla’s truck pulling 10,000 pounds for about 20,000 miles with no damage I am not convinced. Thin metal is just not up to the stress in my opinion.
@lynn, 25 May 2020 at 14:49,
Thanks for sharing your son’s story and that of the other heroes he served with. God bless them all, God bless him. Our country is in good hands as men like him and the others of their generation come into their own.
Hey, thanks for sharing your son’s platoon story also ! I don’t worry about the millennials running the USA eventually. Our parent’s generation and our generation managed to screw it up fairly well and we have survived so far. I know many fine millennials at work (two of my employees are millennials) and church. In fact, my wife and I taught many of them in bible school at church and now we see them walking around church with their kids, it makes me feel old.
After my son’s convoy lost the lead humvee to an IED, they started driving across the country, staying off the roads. They never lost another vehicle to an IED. They did sink a humvee in quicksand, followed by a 7.5 ton truck (converted class 8 Peterbuilt), and an Abrams tank trying to get the previous vehicles out. They brought up a tank retriever from the big Army base in ??? who managed to get the three vehicles out. My son thought before that they could not get an Abrams stuck, they were wrong.
His 2006 deployment was based in Hit, Iraq on the Euphrates river and the Syrian border, a farming community. They woke up one day to two feet of water in the town and the base as the Euphrates flooded due to significant rainfall in Syria. He said it was horrible as the Syrians dumped their raw sewage into the river. All the Marines had been all inoculated for Typhoid, Cholera, and all the fun diseases before leaving the USA though (30+ injections over a one hour period according to him).
CDC’s official word on antibody tests
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/lab/resources/antibody-tests-guidelines.htm
Typical internet URL rot, here is the new URL:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/testing/serology-overview.html
xkcd: Confidence Interval
https://xkcd.com/2311/
Yup, that is the confidence bars on all non first principles (measured data) software today. Software like Global Warming Prediction and SARS-COV-2 Death Rates.
Explained at:
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2311:_Confidence_Interval
Yesterday on knuckledraggin look at number 3
http://ogdaa.blogspot.com/2020/05/fucking-mondays_25.html
Re Frontier: we keep a landline partly because Frontier is the best of a bad lot of internet options for us, and while they claim people get ‘as good’ service without having the landline service too, we have found Frontier to be ….disingenuous to say the least.. about their service quality. We miss Verizon.
Depending on your state, old school copper landline is generally regulated tighter than even DSL. Definitely better than fiber (even AT&T fiber) or cable. I worked for both halves of the telecom CoDominum at some point so I always keep a landline, but I pay AT&T $50/month for the privilege.
Frontier is essentially the old GTE minus the pieces of that company which actually made money. I don’t see the company continuing as an independent entity long-term, but the CoDominium doesn’t want any of the territories, especially the pieces in CA which failed as Contel 30 years ago. If anything, I think AT&T would like to dump all of CA on Frontier or its successor(s) along with the Uverse DSL technology just to avoid the eventual writeoff of that system as the garbage it truly turned out to be.
Scab training during my adventure on The Death Star taught me many things, including the problem of making money supplying landline in CA. I doubt it is possible anymore.
Yesterday on knuckledraggin look at number 3
http://ogdaa.blogspot.com/2020/05/fucking-mondays_25.html
Just imagine that Abrams tank with a humvee and a 7.5 ton truck also in the muck. It would have been cool to have a picture. My son thought that the Weapons Company Commander (a Marine Corps Captain) was going to have a heart attack.
A tank-puller-outer had to be called when I was in Korea. An M-60 had gone skittering down a number of terraced rice paddies on a hill or something and was kinda stuck. IIRC it actually took two tank-puller-outers plus another tank to retrieve it — the two up top with the winches to lift the stuck tank a foot or so, then another at the bottom to pull the nose out of the pit. Something along those lines; memory fades and I saw only part of it.
Of course, given the lack of structural strength of the ground, they were just lucky that the tank-puller-outers didn’t get dragged down and stuck. If that had happened, I think the only thing to do is call it a modern art sculpture and walk away from it. Let the farmer whose land had been wrecked charge an admission fee and make his living that way.
“Orlando Invades Daytona”
The press loves to play up “Florida Man”, but they don’t tell you the full story. I wonder who was throwing cash from the sunroof of the car.
I grew up in Florida, and I’ve never been to Daytona Beach. Honest. It has always struck me as being full of people who are either dirtbags or wanted to pretend to be for a weekend.
Next weekend will be another interesting couple of days in Central Florida because Disney usually hosts the annual official/unofficial “Gay Days” event the weekend after Memorial Day, but the parks are closed this year, leaving the crowd with nowhere to go except the beach … or Gatorland.
Being somewhere on the LGBTQXYZ spectrum doesn’t preclude you from being a dirtbag or dirtbag wannabe.
https://www.fox13news.com/news/theyre-clearly-throwing-cash-at-the-crowd-massive-crowd-spotted-in-daytona-beach-on-memorial-day-weekend
Please don’t trash Gatorland.
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/gatorland-social-distancing-skunk-ape-florida-trnd/index.html
“‘Just waking up is a blessing’: Limbaugh says cancer treatment is ‘kicking my a**'”
https://www.wnd.com/2020/05/just-waking-blessing-limbaugh-says-cancer-treatment-kicking/
“‘For the last 7 days, I have been virtually worthless, virtually useless'”
I hope we get to keep Rush for a while, another decade would be nice. He looks like he has lost of lot of weight in that picture. But he sounded good on the radio this morning.
Hat tip to:
http://drudgereport.com/
“SpaceX’s 1st astronaut launch will be a ‘unique moment’ for America, NASA chief says”
https://www.space.com/spacex-nasa-astronaut-launches-american-spaceflight-moment.html
“SpaceX is still one day away from launching astronauts back into orbit from the U.S., but, NASA has already announced the target date for the company’s next crewed mission: Aug. 30.”
“That new launch date, which is subject to change, will hinges on the results of SpaceX’s historic Demo-2 launch tomorrow (May 27). Liftoff is set for 4:33 p.m. EDT (2033 GMT).”
I am looking forward to daily ballistic flights around the planet using a modified Starship.
“That new launch date, which is subject to change, will hinges on the results of SpaceX’s historic Demo-2 launch tomorrow (May 27). Liftoff is set for 4:33 p.m. EDT (2033 GMT).”
Hopefully, the weather cooperates.
“SpaceX’s Crew Dragon has a new space toilet for astronauts. But how does it work?”
https://www.space.com/spacex-crew-dragon-space-toilet-mystery.html
Ewwwwwwwwwww. Space diapers for all !
I looked closely at the one on display at Space Center Houston… it does not look comfortable. Probably moreso than a catheter and a baggie…
n
Space toilets: I wonder to what extent NASA makes these easier to use through diet changes. Low-fiber diets lead to, um, firmer results, leading to simpler cleanup. Actually, it makes you wonder about high-fiber diets: animals don’t normally need TP. Humans seem to have messy poo only because we eat too many vegetables.
On a complete different topic: My comment about the PC pictures on Google’s store (on Ars Technica) was predictably downvoted into oblivion. So I had to laugh: someone “refuted” my comment, and they were voted to the top. With my comment quoted and displayed in full. In essence, the Streisand effect…