Hot and humid.
Yesterday was hot. Humid. Hot. 105F in my driveway.
I didn’t make much progress on my list, as I was out all afternoon. I did pick up the fridge/freezer, and a bunch of stuff that I needed for my forklift, and if things ever get back to “normal”. Chain and load binders are crazy expensive for what they are so I got some cheap. Might just be wasted if I never have to move the forklift again. On the other hand, this can’t go on forever.
I did get a bunch of meat broken down, vac sealed, and into the new freezer. I’m checking temps several times a day now. Freaking thing has me paranoid.
I got a couple of small projects inside the house done, and one part way done. It’s time to cut the grass again and with the rain, it really needs it. The week flew by.
I also took a little bit and shot the airsoft, the co2 bb gun, and the classic kids red rider bb rifle. With the airsoft I was working standing unsupported snap shots, both hands. With the bb pistol, I doubled my distance and shot for accuracy, supported strong hand, and with the little rifle, I was just shooting for fun, but I did double my distance. I think I’m going to make a target with tin cans hanging from a board instead of sitting on one. They won’t get knocked off and need resetting, but they’ll still move and “ping” when hit. I’ve been shooting at a windchime in the driveway from inside the garage every so often, and it gave me the idea. It’ll look like some kind of hillbilly trash sculpture!
In all seriousness, shooting the bb and airsoft every day is starting to feel really good. Go, shoot something!
And keep stacking. Before you know it, Fall will be here.
nick
I do run Malwarebytes on my main desktop because it is basically free. I paid $14.00 for a lifetime version back in 2010. So far has worked out to $1.40 a year. A fairly good deal.
Be really careful with Malwarebytes in a commercial environment, even the church.
Why?
I have not had any issues. I do know that Malwarebytes and ESET will not work together and cause problems booting from a power off state.
OK. It is a licensing issue, not a program issue. I don’t run any AV software on the church computers other than W10 Defender. I also have the users set up on a restricted account that will not allow software installs or changes on their systems. I suspect most people in the church don’t access nefarious sites.
Wimp. I use the backwards version. 87654321. As an early adapter and user of RPN (Thanks HP) it only makes sense.
Yea RPN!
!NPR aeY
oops.
…new freezer. I’m checking temps several times a day now. Freaking thing has me paranoid.
It will be fine as long as you are watching. It will wait until tou skip watching. It knows. 😉
Boo NPR!
I would have no problem with NPR being National-Socialist Propaganda Radio if they weren’t getting tax dollars and preferential treatment regarding frequency allocation and tax breaks.
Agreed, JimB. Never underestimate the malice of the inanimate.
Never let a machine know you are in a hurry…
n
How many Presidents and candidates have said “I’m defunding NPR”? Yet, it is still funded. Planned Parenthood, etc., use our tax $$ for political purposes. Nothing is done. Welcome to the FUSA.
Another thing that gets me is tRump and Rand Paul squawking about “getting us out of these endless wars”. It’s been four years, why are we still in the swamp and suck? You’re the CINC, tRump, end the wars!
I like Mike Rowe and have watched his shows:
Mike Rowe Answers a Fan Letter About COVID-19 — It Probably Wasn’t the Answer They Expected
His BLUF: “Of course, I’m concerned. I’m just not petrified.”
I like Mike Rowe and have watched his shows:
His BLUF: “Of course, I’m concerned. I’m just not petrified.”
The new case numbers are trending downward again. They will spike again in mid-September, two weeks after Labor Day.
The hysteria now is oriented towards closing the schools until August 2021 while teachers and administrators continue to get paid and capital projects continue moving forward over the next year.
And the election. Continued hysteria is the only chance the Dems have of putting Plugs in the White House.
ammunitiondepot.com
Still has 762 in stock and has some expensive 223 and 9 as well
n
Hive mind
I want to analyze this 777 page pdf. It is composed of e-mail testimony. Regrettably, it is a mix of the pertinent ordinances and unrelated matters. I’d like to see if there was a spike in supportive emails after a certain organization ran an ad campaign, and whether the emails are using the boilerplate language suggested by the certain organization.
I have people willing to do it by hand but that is inefficient.
Any suggestions?
http://publicdocs.muni.org/sirepub/cache/0/dnaaim45t41ttk45rzmfu355/109879807242020091022786.PDF
Resetting my Surface Laptop 1 (I5, 8 gig, 256 gig SSD) back to fresh W10 PRO install. Anyone interested in buying? If so make an offer at rayt four-three-five at comcast dot fishing_apparatus. Silver color. Comes with the power supply, Surface Dock (version 1), four adapters (USB: ethernet, Display Port: HDMI, VGA, and Digital). Everything works fine. Laptop is about two years old. Replaced by a Surface Laptop 3.
If not appropriate to offer something for sale on this site, then remove this post and apologies offered.
Interesting. Can’t get amazon.com to respond.
“ERR_TIMED_OUT”
I know they have a robust server platform.
I have people willing to do it by hand but that is inefficient.
Any suggestions?
Looks like the PDF hasn’t been “flattened”. Do you have the boilerplate language?
The most straighforward way to do it would be to extract the text from the PDF, chop into the individual emails, and grade each email according to how closely it matches the boilerplate.
Did you take Data Mining? I can’t cite names off the top of my head, but there are some easy/popular algorithms to minimize English. Put the minimized language of each email into a vector and compare the angle of each summarized email to a vector of the boilerplate.
It is really spooky how close you can get in determining how closely one text matches another.
Jenny, I tried and failed to extract the text from that PDF. I don’t know if it’s because the saved file is too big (44MB), a version mismatch between the file and my tools, or my ineptitude. I’d planned to pull out the date of each email and build a histogram from that; didn’t have a good idea for determining whether a template was used. (Rather, yes, I do, but no good and time-efficient ideas.)
If no one else has any better ideas, I suggest diving the 777 pages into 50-page batches and letting people eyeball them and tally results. It’ll probably be faster than screwing around with doing it “automatically”.
Greg’s reply to Jenny is the proper data science-centric approach, but I think it’s inefficient for this amount of data. Even setting aside any data extraction problems, I think it would take more human time to set up the parsing and then categorization of the email messages — I work with data scientists all day on my current job and have worked with them in the past. It takes them stinkin’ forever to get things tuned and running. When you’re talking about millions of records it’s worth the time and effort. For about 500 email messages, not so much.
To SteveF’s comment above: did anybody else have any problems extracting the text from the pdf?
I had no apparent problems extracting it to Word .docx (ugh) as well as Plain Text…
The rather intimidating 777 pages is just actually bloat – the actual text comes to a reasonable 1.2MB.
Or am I missing something?
Jenny
If it is of any help, the poppler-utils in linux has a pdftotext utility.
pdftotext 109879807242020091022786.PDF 109879807242020091022786.txt
It appears there are approximately 559 emails.
Below is the start of the converted file. Note: the Subject:, From:, Sent:, To: data are separated. X’d out part of the names.
XXXXX, Kiana D.
From:
Sent:
To:
Subject:
Mark XXXXXXX
Tuesday, July 14, 2020 10:41 AM
Testimony
No. AM 400-2020; Amendment No. 2 to Grant Agreement with CSS for Operations of BFS for the
MOA and AHD
I am asking for your support for the amendment to CSS’s existing grant agreement that will provide
important Shelter.
I clicked through the link Rowe posted to a Joe Rogan interview with the doc who predicts “48 million hospitalizations out of 96 million cases,” (one out of every two cases hospitalized), and “over 480 thousand deaths…that can occur over the next three to seven months.”
Date of the interview? March 10th.
Well, we’re over four months out from those predictions, and so far, Dr.Osterholm has been as wrong as any of the other expert (but turned out to be hysterical) doom-cryers.
Sitting on Lavaca Bay in Texas in my parents house. TS Hanna is coming in with 8 foot waves coming over the bulkhead. Wind is about 35 mph sustained. I am planning on watching the first inning of the Astros at 8pm and then driving home to Rosenberg.
Sitting on Lavaca Bay in Texas in my parents house. TS Hanna is coming in with 8 foot waves coming over the bulkhead. Wind is about 35 mph sustained. I am planning on watching the first inning of the Astros at 8pm and then driving home to Rosenberg.
No rain in Austin.
My yard could actually use a few inches. Not that it really matters — Number One Son next door took out all his weeds last Saturday, and that was the green in his yard. I’m “Lawn of the Year” in comparison.
I hope my neighbor never moves.
“Joe Biden’s disastrous plans for America’s suburbs” By Betsy McCaughey
https://nypost.com/2020/07/21/joe-bidens-disastrous-plans-for-americas-suburbs/
“If you live in the suburbs or you’re a city dweller eyeing a move to a quiet cul-de-sac where your kids can play outside, you need to know about Joe Biden’s plan for a federal takeover of local zoning laws.”
“The ex-veep wants to ramp up an Obama-era social engineering scheme called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing that mercifully barely got underway before President Trump took office, vowing to stop it.”
“Biden’s plan is to force suburban towns with single-family homes and minimum lot sizes to build high-density affordable housing smack in the middle of their leafy neighborhoods — local preferences and local control be damned.”
Homeless shelters in the suburbs for all !
Another thing that gets me is tRump and Rand Paul squawking about “getting us out of these endless wars”. It’s been four years, why are we still in the swamp and suck? You’re the CINC, tRump, end the wars!
Well, Trump has listened to the experts in the Swamp who say that the entire middle east would be on fire if we leave. Me, I say let it burn.
But, I am going to support Trump no matter what. Biden is a freaking zombie and will be a figurehead for the crazies. I fully expect all elections after this one to be shams if the dumbocrats win.
“Biden’s plan is to force suburban towns with single-family homes and minimum lot sizes to build high-density affordable housing smack in the middle of their leafy neighborhoods — local preferences and local control be damned.”
Homeless shelters in the suburbs for all !
We have a new rental complex down the street that features an odd design — townhomes with big backyards, but 1/3 of that backyard space occupied by a cistern for irrigation connected to the gutter system.
I assume H1B tastes. A friend at work came up to look at them when they were planned to be condos, but he passed due to the density and the big water tank.
Well, Trump has listened to the experts in the Swamp who say that the entire middle east would be on fire if we leave. Me, I say let it burn.
Taking out the Iranian general who had to be identified by his gaudy cocktail ring was a stroke of genius on Trump’s part.
We have a few generals like that.
Breaker-break: Roger that! 10-4! I’ll be standing on the side! Over & out!
When it comes to putting homeless and similar anywhere around us, we are all NIMBYs.
Dad and I were out yesterday inspecting all of recent port commission work. Dad is on the port commission so he is very interested in the work to date. We first looked at the new two million dollar bulkhead project at the south harbor. There was a new 90 foot long four story tugboat tied up at new bulkhead with two crude oil barges being loaded. It was flying a four foot long Trump MAGA flag. Neat !
Then we went out to check the land clearing probject that I mentioned yesterday that we four wheeled. One of the local dredgers has been dumping his old equipment on the 100+ acres that was just cleared. I stopped counting at 12 abandoned diesel v8 excavators. What a mess !
Our Post Office, that serves Tri-Cities WA, has decided that it has delivered enough mail and parcels this week. None today, Friday 7/24, and there will be none until Monday 7/27 IF they decide to work.
The Postal Union (American Postal Workers Union, APWU) has told the USPS and the gooberment in an official document (that a got a copy of this morning from an inside source who will remain unnamed for her protection) that there will be no more overtime work, no more special treatment of packages from certain online retailers, mail will only be delivered in the cool of the morning IF they feel like it and mail will only be sorted in the afternoon IF they feel like it.
There is a real problem here and it is not getting any attention in the MSM. The many years of the inmates running the asylum are bearing fruit, rather not bearing fruit.
If your mail is still coming through, consider yourself lucky for now. The end is coming.
If you look at the APWU website you can sense the tension that they have, but the stuff that is for Union Members Only is not so soft-spoken.
Our Post Office, that serves Tri-Cities WA, has decided that it has delivered enough mail and parcels this week. None today, Friday 7/24, and there will be none until Monday 7/27 IF they decide to work.
The host filling in for Limbaugh reported that the mail-in ballots in Seattle were getting delivered inside fliers listing candidates the union supports.
Not that it really matters. Tri-Cities? Your real ballot was completed by a paralegal at Perkins-Coie in Portland last month. Chances are they’re the family member we know in the office!
Eh. On second thought, Boise office.
The drop box at our big Post Office was broken for the better part of a month. We have a contract Post Office at the storage place near the house, but they shut down whenever non-essential retail gets closed by government orders.
I think we’ll see one more lockdown in Texas. The Governor is going to get scared of his poll numbers and give in to the suburban puckered sphincters, but another lockdown will be the end of him regardless.
The issue Marcele had yesterday with the comments probably happened because of a too-quick submit of the comment. Because it was so quick (he must be a really fast typist!), the comment was rejected as being from a ‘comment spambot’. That rejection was due to the anti-comment-spam-bot plugin that I wrote and installed/updated yesterday.
It is possible, in a default WP install, for a bot to post comments via CURL or similar processes. So my plugin prevents that in various ways, including by changing a hidden form variable after a delay. If the variable is not changed, as if when a bot scrapes the site to get all the form fields, then submits those, then the submittal is deemed as spam by the plugin.
Normal operation (by a real person) would allow that hidden variable to be changed, and comments are submitted properly. But if you paste into the form and submit before that timeout, the comment will be blocked.
So now, the latest version of the plugin hides the ‘submit’ button (labeled ‘Post Comment’ here) until after a short delay. You can see that if you scroll to the bottom of the page so you can see the comment form, then refresh the page. The ‘Post Comment’ button will not be there until after a short delay. This shouldn’t cause a problem for most people, as the delay is quite short – shorter than the time for a real person (and I use the term loosely here…) to type in their command.
The result will be no ‘spam’ comments that can only be seen by the admins (Nick and I), but they do clutter up things. There were about 5-10 spam comments a day, and they have to be cleaned out manually. Now, with the new version of the plugin, there won’t be any bot-submitted spam comments.
…. in case you wanted to know …
The USPS is very low on my list for sending anyone anything. Under half a dozen first class envelopes per year, mostly to government agencies who don’t have to give a shit about customer service or convenience (which is to say, almost any government agency) and one or two packages per year because the local USPS office is less likely to be arbitrarily closed than the local UPS office. On the incoming side, a few bills (almost all unwanted paper copies for bills that were already handled online), a lot of junk mail, and just barely enough birthday cards from Grandma that I don’t just empty the mailbox into the trashcan once a week.
I understand and agree with the reasoning behind having a guarantee of a mail service be part of the federal government’s charter, but the USPS as currently constituted is about worthless.
I understand and agree with the reasoning behind having a guarantee of a mail service be part of the federal government’s charter, but the USPS as currently constituted is about worthless.
There should be NO public employee unions whatsoever. Period.
Meant to mention yesterday but was too busy: At one former residence, where I lived for fifteen years, mail delivery was sporadically lousy, with me not getting things I knew should be arriving and often getting mail for my neighbors. When I got something for them I’d bring it over in the evening. Very often they’d hand me some of my mail. “We got this a few weeks ago and meant to bring it to you but never had the chance.”
I’m a misanthrope because of people.
When I got something for them I’d bring it over in the evening. Very often they’d hand me some of my mail. “We got this a few weeks ago and meant to bring it to you but never had the chance.”
I have delivered much mail to my neighbors without getting any back that I know of. But I just put it in their mailboxes out at the street.
And I have no idea what a misanthrope is.
@lynn
Not to be confused with a Lycanthrope… one will hate you the other will ate you…
n
I am staying one more night at mom and dad’s and watched the Houston Astros with them. Astros won 8 to 2 over the Mariners. We are all baseball fans and really enjoyed the game.
I may have to get Fubotv which has at&t sportsnet so I can watch the Astros at home. The cost is $55/month. Much cheaper than directv. And no long comittment, just month to month.
Having no one in the stands was weird. But they piped in fan noise anyway. The players did not seem to mind.
I think we’ll see one more lockdown in Texas. The Governor is going to get scared of his poll numbers and give in to the suburban puckered sphincters, but another lockdown will be the end of him regardless.
I don’t think that Abbott is stupid enough to lock down Texas again. If he does, the lt governor Dan Patrick will eat him for lunch in 2022. And Abbott knows that.
I tried a couple different things to be efficient in parsing thru that huge pdf. While I was dicking around someone else just muscled thru it by hand. My reading speed post TBI sucks so I’m glad someone else did it. I wasn’t getting thru 700+ pages anytime soon.
What I noticed, and will address with the clerk Monday, was the mish-mash of testimony for completely unrelated ordinances. Also, missing testimony, like that of yours truly.
Not sure if it is malice or incompetence but the end result is the same.
Also – people are weird idiots. We waved signs Friday night during ‘rush hour’. I did NOT like the fact that I was recognized. People asked bizarre questions and got testy when I suggested they read the four pages of the two ordinances. The news guy didn’t like it when I responded “no, I don’t do that” and turned my back on him in response to an interview request (they’ve been selectively editing interviews for the worst possible light).
I am not enjoying this. People suck.
Heads. On pikes. Nice sharp ones at the edge of town.
@SteveF
Man your PO sounds rotten. I’ve used the post office frequently since I was a little kid. We wrote letters to our family in New Zealand because calling was astronomical. Letters took about three weeks.
Last Friday, about 10:30 PM (stays open until nearly midnight at our airport), we dropped thousands of flyers in the mail. Most of them reached their destination by Monday.
We opt for a PO Box rather than curbside mail (theft is rampant) but rarely have problems. We write and receive a lot of letters. Maybe you just have bad voodoo. Maybe take up writing letters to soothe the offended PO gawds?
@all
Thanks for the helpful suggestions. Greg, I did take data mining. I enjoyed the course immensely but I made it thru by the skin of my teeth. My post TBI brain didn’t much like the math. I could understand it while I read the material but retention was … challenging. I am not convinced my work was worthy of a passing grade but accepted it with humility.
“so I can watch the Astros at home. The cost is $55/month. ”
— seems like a lot just to watch baseball. Of course with the season being what it is, that’s like what, 40-50 games a month? 😉 For 32 months???
(baseball season seems REALLY long to me)
n