Hot and humid. Because why not?
Happy Columbus Day. Without whom we might still be serfs in Europe. And because FYTW.
The air was saturated all day Sunday, to the point that water in the driveway didn’t dry.
I worked on little things all day. Got ready for the roofers. Did some stuff in the house to make my wife happier. Did a little bit of stuff in the garage. Set another rat trap for whatever is roaming my food shelves. There was gnawing on a bucket overnight so the visitor is still coming. Nothing in the glue traps, so I moved them around a bit. I’ll add more if the problem doesn’t resolve itself in a day or two. I may add more anyway.
Spent an hour in the pool with the family. It was a good day.
I’m starting to see stuff online that is adding to my concerns about the insurgency. People are noticing and identifying the Command and Control structure for the socialists driving the protests and riots. Well, not the structure, but that there is one. Things are starting to show up in the live streams, and during the incidents that are clear indicators to people who know what to look for. There is an organization at work. They are training. They are supplying. They are escalating. They are exploring tactics. The latest incident is the “security guard” shooting a ‘patriot’ protester in the face and killing him.
There is evidence that the security guard/ bodyguard is more than he seems, or at least a fellow traveler. There is some video that looks suspiciously like the event was instigated and controlled and provoked. What happens with the guy next should be revelatory. Spicy times are here for some people and in some places. Don’t be there applies.
What would your life look like if your movements were constrained by real, well considered fear/concern over being physically attacked in public if you just happened to be in the wrong place? The baying mob can make your supermarket a no-go zone. Or your bank. Or the mall where your kid works. Or your block. What if they decide your day care or private school has too much ‘privilege’ and mobs it? Can’t happen? There are places where the private school kids don’t wear uniforms anymore because it marks them for kidnapping. There are places where having a sticker for your kids’ school on your vehicle can set you up for all sorts of bad things.
Do you have a company parking sticker or hang tag on your vehicle? Does your neighborhood have parking stickers? Do you have a school or team sticker on your car? What about your license plate trim ring? A school sign in your yard? Any political slogans? Vanity plates that are easy to remember? How easy would it be to dox you from a picture of you or your car? There are people on the right making note of campaign signs in people’s yards, I’m certain the left is doing so too.
I don’t want to believe that is the direction we’re headed, but I see escalation wherever I look. We all know the end state of marxist/socialist government- people kneeling next to an open grave. As I pointed out at dinner to my kids, it has happened within living memory and on this planet. 100 Million dead. There are wealthy and powerful forces at work here trying it again.
Yes, resist. No, don’t stick out. The best partisan is the guy no one would ever suspect. It may come to that. I hope not, but because hope isn’t a strategy, I’ll keep working to improve my situation, and to keep stacking.
nick
added- note too that whenever there is an incident like this now, someone finds the pics that link X person to other protests, other gatherings. Often it’s their own social media that provides the link. The cops and three letter agencies are using social media as the world’s most pervasive intelligence gathering tool, even our locals mention it on the scanner. Don’t feed the beast. And don’t be complacent. If your smartphone, vizio tv, or alexa can hear you talk about vacations and you start to see targeted ads, it can certainly hear political speech too. Is anyone doing that today? Will they be in 6 months? 6 years? The recordings never go away.
Security concerns that have never occurred to me before. Food for thought.
I would convert all my 750,000 lines of F77 to C++ today if I could. But the change of the first vector index from one in F77 to zero in C++ is a killer. The only Fortran to C converter that actually works is the old F2C program used on Unix. But F2C produces unreadable gibberish so it is just a one shot converter.
F2C is essentially a compiler front end. The output isn’t meant for humans.
DOE and Nvidia were collaborating on turning Fortran into another LLVM language.
Zeitgeist. I saw both of these articles after I’d written today’s post.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/7-predictions-how-2020-comes-end
–and this one
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/adjustment-day-looms-americas-headed-violent-civil-war
–Like a married couple saying the word “divorce”, some things take on a life of their own.
n
Portland OR, USA. Not Bagdad. Not Moscow.
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/10/12/11/34286916-8830663-image-a-35_1602498464303.jpg
n
Portland OR, USA. Not Bagdad. Not Moscow.
Looks like the same geographical area where all the fun has been concentrated to date.
Weather turned this weekend so the pros are out. Still, Trump is right — about an hour to clean house if the drawbridges went up, west perimeter established at 405, and Portland Police continuing to crack skulls of the miscreants wandering into The Pearl to the north.
All Trump needs is an invitation from the city. Brilliant politics.
Subbing today, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Teacher contacted me last night so it was an unplanned absence. Have no idea what is going on and none of my business. A couple of teachers are out because of planned vacations. They had planned a fall break, put money on condo at the beach, and are making the journey. Fall break has been effectively cancelled as the school year started late. State mandates X-number of hours. Friday is virtual day.
I generally sub for this teacher and I am her first choice. It has been that way for the last four years. Teachers have their favorite subs.
Captured a cell phone this morning and turned the phone into the office. I tell the kids that I will do so if I see a phone. Clear warning. I have done this several times this year and one would think the kids would know that I mean what I say. But no, someone has to try and sneak using the phone thinking they won’t get caught. I suspect many times they are successful in the clandestine operation of the phone. All it takes is just that once. I particularly like capturing phones on the last school day of the week. The parent has to come to school to get the phone and for working parents that may not be possible on the day I capture the phone. Being without a phone all weekend is like a death sentence to some of these kids.
Last class of the day is a rowdy bunch that require clamping down hard. Every sub, and the teacher, has problems with that class. But in the end I always win and will send a student to the office without a second thought.
The end times are coming. We (those few of us who survive) will be thrown back to the Stone Age (at best) and have to claw our way back over many millennia. Prepare all you want, but there will be no power (of any kind), no transportation, no distribution of anything, no clean water, no medical care. You will have to fight, again and again, for your life, land, and sustenance.
Just a sign of the times. Today is Columbus Day, Indigenous Peoples Day, and Native American Day.
Folks, you can’t have it all.
I am going to enjoy every day and will protect my family (friends will not be trusted, sorry) and go out with a whimper. Yes, we will all go out with a whimper at the hands of some pond scum whack-a-do. No one is safe or assured of survival.
As I take stock of my 70+ years there is a lot I have overcome and achieved and I will do more as long as I can, but with a sense of reality.
…but with a sense of reality.
At least you ended on a somewhat cheery note. 😉
Question for the house: does anyone know of a “pot boiled dry” sensor for the kitchen?
I’m looking for something that will sit silently and happily while a pot is simmering but go off if the pot goes dry and starts to burn the contents. Ideally this device could be left on all the time and would ignore hot pots and pans while someone was moving around the stove, but that may be too much to ask. A smoke detector probably won’t suffice, because the smoke detectors go off more than half the times that Grandma cooks. It’s likely that something exists but I can’t even figure out search term to get me anything but an instant read thermometer, a smoke detector, or a page of advice on what to do if you have a grease fire.
Probably I could make something with an Arduino, an IR temperature sensor, and a motion sensor, but I don’t have time for that. (Unless I can fold that into a tech project to teach my daughter some engineering, but that won’t be happening until Christmas break at the earliest.)
Thanks in advance.
I’m trying to think of something equivalent from when I was in high school. There was no “thing” I couldn’t live without for some period of time. My family had a 1 hour a day TV rule so no TV didn’t impact me too much. We didn’t have video games at home. There was a coin arcade a 2 mile bike ride away but it was never my hangout. I enjoyed using my TRS-80 but I could (and did) put it aside for periods of time since it was about programming not games.
Was there a “thing” that you had to use all day every day back when you were in high school? Back in the early 80s I just don’t remember being tied to a device as strongly as kids today are tied to their phones.
Question for the house: does anyone know of a “pot boiled dry” sensor for the kitchen?
I was looking for thermometers recently, so I went back over my notes. I did not find anything suitable, unless you will put up with a corded sensor that needs to be put inside the pot. There are many thermometers for grills or BBQs that have alarms that can be set to a temperature just above boiling, but again with only corded sensors. As for an IR sensor, I have never seen one that has an alarm.
@stevef How about one of these stove timers? They shut off the entire stove after xx minutes. Electric stove only. You have to ‘start’ the stove first, then the timer turns off the stove.
There are some with motion sensors mentioned in the article.
https://www.thiscaringhome.org/automatic-stove-turn-off-devices/
Did a googles/bings/ducks of “electric stove timer” .
The first thing to come along was probably TV (especially when cable and MTV hit the mix), telephone (I knew girls that easily spent 3+ hours a day talking on a land line), and then I’d say the original Nintendo (NES) was probably the gaming console that got kids glued to video games hours per day. I do know a few avid readers that have their nose in a book to the point of it being amusing.
JimB, THANKS! I should have thought of that. I have a fancy-schmancy meat thermometer with two probes and settable temperature alarm thresholds. I’ll see if setting it to, say, 250F does what I need.
RickH: Nice idea but it’s a gas range. Plus, Grandma can’t figure out how to use any of the timers on the range, or use the oven at all. (To be fair, she can’t read English.)
Arlo and Janis: “A Thing About Machines”
https://www.gocomics.com/arloandjanis/2020/10/12
The time of the Terminator is near.
@Stevef
Gas range makes it harder. Maybe a switch to an electric range is indicated.
Although there are stoves with features for seniors. Search string “gas stove safety for elderly”. Articles and advice. Like this one: https://seniorsafetyadvice.com/can-gas-stoves-be-safe-for-the-elderly/ .
Found this gas shutoff. https://iguardfire.com/gas-stove-model/?v=4326ce96e26c . You have to press the ‘start’ button to start the gas.
Add a little sticker to label the ‘start’ button in her language.
The Swan Eaters: 20 minutes, 5 years
https://www.gocomics.com/swan-eaters/2020/10/12
Stay out of the demon dimensions, the rules are different and not in your favor.
Thanks, Rick. I didn’t even know such things existed.
Even though I’m here in the house and downstairs almost all the time, it’s becoming clear I need to do more with the house rather than relying just on my alertness. Lucky me, there’s an entire industry on the topic.
Roofers are banging and scraping away… debris is getting everywhere, no matter that they seem to be taking extra care. There are lots of little pieces when you tear up a roof, and they slide down.
n
Violence in the US: Does anyone have real, solid statistics on the frequency of violence by the left vs by the right? I figured I would find something on the FBI pages, but I didn’t. In Europe, at least, violence by the left is more than 100x as frequent as violence by the right.
@DadCooks: I think you are too pessimistic. The US has some serious problems, yes, but the US is not the world. If a civil war really does break out there, there’s no reason for the rest of the world to get involved, except to help restore order after the secessions have been agreed.
– – – – –
Man, it’s not only Ray’s students who get so dependent on smartphones. I use mine for so many different things: mail, calendar, computing, entertainment, reading, etc, etc… When a phone breaks, even with the fancy backups, setting up a new one is a PITA. Each and every banking and TFA applications, for example, requires some sort of abstruse registration on a new phone. Which is great for security, but…
My phone is broken: both the microphone and the speakers are dead. So I am setting up a temporary phone, while sending my phone in for guarantee service. Which means setting up everything once now, and again when the phone has been fixed.
On the other hand, it’s pretty cool what phone can do. I was (well, still am) chasing some odd bug in our network configuration. As part of the diagnostic, I had a Linux terminal open on the phone, and was moving it from AP to AP, sending out pings.
In the end, it looks like our fiber router has some paranoid setting that prevents two cable-connected devices from seeing each other. Like they’re in a DMZ or something – but the DMZ is turned off. Odd: I would assume the four ethernet ports are just a switch, but apparently not. Anyway, I didn’t manage to find the problem, so I replugged the devices I need to see each other into the big switch I have hanging off of the router.
I also need to set up a VLAN for all of our IOT gadgets. The robot vacuum cleaners really do not need to be able to see the servers. I guess I’m paranoid. Won’t do it tonight – it’s too late – but maybe later this week.
Roofers are banging and scraping away… debris is getting everywhere, no matter that they seem to be taking extra care. There are lots of little pieces when you tear up a roof, and they slide down.
I would assume that they are going to run the magnetic roller around the house to pick up the loose nails ? Those loose nails feel awesome when you or the mutt steps on them. Plus they become a high speed projectile with the lawn mower.
@steveF
https://seniorcareadvice.com/keeping-seniors-safe-in-the-kitchen.htm
google elder care stoves for more links
This came up with my wife’s uncle’s mom. She’d get up in the middle of the night and start cooking, then forget and go back to bed.
Of course, my dad would put a pot of sausage on to boil, then sit down and fall asleep, and only wake when the smoke detectors went off. Had to replace all the knobs on the stove one time. And all the paint on the first floor another. He usually went down to the fire house and got a smoke ejector himself, but after he got too much sh!t from the guys, he put hooks above the doors to hang box fans. it happened often enough that it was worth setting that up. There is also a special smoke odor killer spray that really works. Learned that from him too.
n
WRT granny, an induction cooktop that doesn’t get physically hot might help protect her from burning herself too.
Hopefully into the rain gutter. Got to keep that possum company.
Violence in the US: Does anyone have real, solid statistics on the frequency of violence by the left vs by the right? I figured I would find something on the FBI pages, but I didn’t. In Europe, at least, violence by the left is more than 100x as frequent as violence by the right.
@DadCooks: I think you are too pessimistic. The US has some serious problems, yes, but the US is not the world. If a civil war really does break out there, there’s no reason for the rest of the world to get involved, except to help restore order after the secessions have been agreed.
Look at the number of cops injured on the job this year. I cannot find anything newer than June 8:
https://nypost.com/2020/06/08/more-than-700-officers-injured-in-george-floyd-protests-across-us/
If the USA does split into several nations, other countries will not be welcome to “help out”. Even if they are “invited” by the loser in a political campaign. Especially China and Russia.
The USA military takes their mission to protect the shores of the USA extremely seriously and invasion fleets will be first cruise missiled and then nuked on the way here. The USA military has war gamed this very scenario many times (I knew people in the military in the 1980s looking at this) and has firm plans for the possibility.
One of the scenarios is two political opponents claiming victory of the presidency and one of them ignores all of the House of Representatives directives.
F2C is essentially a compiler front end. The output isn’t meant for humans.
From the original f2c paper:
“Thus the C output of f2c would probably be something of a nightmare to maintain as C; it would be much more sensible to maintain the original Fortran, translating it anew each time it changed. Some commercial vendors, e.g., those listed in Appendix A, seek to perform translations yielding C that one might reasonably maintain directly; these translations generally require some manual intervention.”
I’m guessing that the commercial vendors are no longer around.
Fortran isn’t amenable to tokenization by Lex/Flex, unfortunately. At least, I don’t see one looking quickly.
I finally drilled the hole in the spare truck key. It’s hanging on the left screw that mounts the rear license plate. I spent more time setting up than actually drilling and mounting.
Now to do the van.
Vaseline? 🙂
FORTRAN is best tokenized and parsed by a series of ad hoc kludges which are tweaked until they work. It is not amenable to any currently invented form of regular expression or grammar.
I understand the constraints of punched cards, back before I was born, but I can’t help but think that the FORTRAN designers should have insisted on whitespace or other clear delineator between tokens. Nice try, guys, but I’m going to have to score that as a failure.
Hahahaha!
If Ugandan “peace keeping” forces arrive, they’ll die. “A rifleman behind every blade of grass.” Oh, I’m sure that some TWANLOCs in the US will invite in globalists from anyone willing to send them, but the TWANLOCs aren’t going to live through the troubles as it is — even if they get their precious urban enclaves of right [sic] -thinking people, they’ll run out of food and electricity soon enough.
–they’ll run out of commercially prepared food…. long pig won’t take long to make a comeback.
It might be time to review some of Vice News’ videos from Liberia
https://video.vice.com/en_us/video/the-cannibal-warlords-of-liberia/560a7cac7676b705187e64f7?jwsource=cl
41:31 for the story of why General Butt Naked no longer eats meat…
The Without Rule of Law video is very good.
Vice has gone hard left but the videos from Africa are very well worth watching. They are not for the faint of heart, and NSFW on content and language.
n
If Ugandan “peace keeping” forces arrive, they’ll die. “A rifleman behind every blade of grass.” Oh, I’m sure that some TWANLOCs in the US will invite in globalists from anyone willing to send them, but the TWANLOCs aren’t going to live through the troubles as it is — even if they get their precious urban enclaves of right [sic] -thinking people, they’ll run out of food and electricity soon enough.
From
http://acronymsandslang.com/definition/218283/TWANLOC-meaning.html
“TWANLOC means Those Who Are No Longer Our Countrymen”
F2C is essentially a compiler front end. The output isn’t meant for humans.
From the original f2c paper:
“Thus the C output of f2c would probably be something of a nightmare to maintain as C; it would be much more sensible to maintain the original Fortran, translating it anew each time it changed. Some commercial vendors, e.g., those listed in Appendix A, seek to perform translations yielding C that one might reasonably maintain directly; these translations generally require some manual intervention.”
I’m guessing that the commercial vendors are no longer around.
Fortran isn’t amenable to tokenization by Lex/Flex, unfortunately. At least, I don’t see one looking quickly.
I have looked at the output of f2c before. I used the word gibberish on purpose. “But F2C produces unreadable gibberish so it is just a one shot converter.”
I bought a commercial Fortran 77 to C converter many years ago, FOR_C. The guy did not disclose that it did not support the DEC Fortran Structure, Union, and Map extensions that we use extensively. I tried to get him to add them but he retired and quit the business.
I have looked at the freeware Fable program but it does not fix the initial vector indexing issue. It adds one to the length of all arrays and indexes them at [1] to [length]. Not good for generic code.
http://cci.lbl.gov/fable/
So that request was bad enough to drive him right out of his line of work?
Eh, could be worse. Eyes Wide Shut was so bad it killed Stanley Kubrick.
Here’s an article about how Starlink is being provided to the Hoh tribe (northwestern corner of WA state; very isolated, south of Forks WA on the Pacific coast). https://www.pcmag.com/news/native-american-tribe-gets-early-access-to-spacexs-starlink-and-says-its .
They got early access, and don’t mention the speeds. Small tribe; less than 150 members, with a small reservation.
Here’s an article about how Starlink is being provided to the Hoh tribe (northwestern corner of WA state; very isolated, south of Forks WA on the Pacific coast).
They got early access, and don’t mention the speeds. Small tribe; less than 150 members, with a small reservation.
When we first moved to WA State, the time frame was just at the tail end of the “Twilight” phenomenon, so we used to get asked by friends about sightseeing in Forks.
They always found the answer disheartening — due to the weather in Forks being generally miserable and decided lack of anything to see, the movies were filmed in and around Portland and Canon Beach with the exception of the high school, located in Kalama, WA.
I have looked at the output of f2c before. I used the word gibberish on purpose. “But F2C produces unreadable gibberish so it is just a one shot converter.”
I assume f2c works properly, but, in addition to producing unmaintainable code, performance would be lousy with some of the defaults. I assume that the local variables are static rather than automatic, hence the need for the option to do otherwise, but Windows used to have brutal stack restrictions in the 16 bit days IIRC.
Unfortunately, a lot of the old school Labs guys disappeared ~ 20 years ago. Any who were left skedaddled with Stroustrup when the new owners of AT&T circulated word that everyone would be eligible for scab duty in 2009. We all thought they were kidding until the first pole climbing assignments and training notices started arriving in early 2008.
AT&T couldn’t make money as a data and long distance carrier after the telecom deregulation, and Wall Street, enamored with the phony revenue-per-employee of the WorldCom Ponzi, didn’t have patience for the Comcast experiment to work.
I’m surprised that someone hasn’t tried a fresh attempt at f2c as a thesis or ambitious undergrad project. OTOH, there are certain buzzwords that get the big tech companies to fund grants, and a code translator probably wouldn’t be worth much to some prof regardless of the amount of old Fortran code which may be lurking out there.
@Greg
Re: Twilight and Forks — that hasn’t stopped Forks from capitalizing on all of the tourists visiting because of “Twilight”. Lots of Twilight tourist places there. Lots of people visit Forks just for that reason.
Also a place where the locals mistook a bus of mixed race capers as Antifa this last summer. Forks (and most of that area from Sequim to the west coast) is right-leaning, and there was much paranoia there about Antifa.
“Here’s every Antifa goon arrested in Portland last night during their BLM anti-police protest. Notice anything they all have in common? ”
https://notthebee.com/article/heres-every-protester-who-got-arrested-in-portland-last-night-during-their-blm-march
That is a fairly surly bunch of …………
Ah, now I understand the beards. Unlike tolkienian dwarves, these mental midgets use beards as a signifier for gender. MUCH more reliable than pulchritude.
n
Re: Twilight and Forks — that hasn’t stopped Forks from capitalizing on all of the tourists visiting because of “Twilight”. Lots of Twilight tourist places there. Lots of people visit Forks just for that reason.
Kalama had a couple of shops related to “Twilight” for a while. I always found it interesting that the location scouts couldn’t find a period high school in Oregon, closer to the other filming locations, that wasn’t dilapidated.
Forks is out there. I guess the local tribe isn’t part of the Native American consortium that runs fiber backbone west of the Cascades and up the Columbia Gorge. I don’t remember the name of the company — I interviewed with them, though. LS-something? The delightfully moth-eaten appearance of the conference room wasn’t a Portland affect; they had moths which I picked up and who proceeded to eat a big hole in my interview coat before I got it to the cleaners the following week.
Ah, now I understand the beards. Unlike tolkienian dwarves, these mental midgets use beards as a signifier for gender. MUCH more reliable than pulchritude.
We had two transmen in the engineering department at WA State in Vantucky. They had serious beards which grew in fast once they started the testosterone but the hormones did nothing to their voices.
Ah, now I understand the beards. Unlike tolkienian dwarves, these mental midgets use beards as a signifier for gender. MUCH more reliable than pulchritude.
n
pulchritude
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/pulchritude
[ puhl-kri-tood, -tyood ]
noun
physical beauty; comeliness.
I learned a new word today ! I am fairly sure that it will not make the transition from short term memory to medium term memory though.
Thanks @nick !
Head west on highway 110 from Forks and one will arrive at La Push on the coast. Spent three nights there to get away from everything for awhile. No TV, no cell service, no internet. At least not when I was there. Condo on the beach. I think there was a phone in the lobby at the Condo. Only a single restaurant and it was nothing to write home about. Really nothing in La Push except a few houses, RV park and some fishing facilities. I would return.
There is also a special smoke odor killer spray that really works.
Please share. Wonder if it might help for our forest fire smoke. I did some searching, and of course there are lots of products. Some might work.
I have second hand experience, from a neighbor who had a fire, that this is a real challenge. He said that all surfaces have to be cleaned to quickly get rid of the odor. It will eventually go away, but I could smell it at least a year later. That was with extensive cleaning. The odor gets into everything. This might be one area where masking perfumes might be appropriate.
Nice little $115 check from the nursing home today for mom’s “trust fund” aka haircut fund. I thought she had about $55, must have added more and forgotten.
A summary from Medicaid, also. One of the “you will pay $X per month” things but reading down, “you don’t qualify for benefits”. Reading more down, Mom is deceased. Really? Ok, I dunno. They seem to act like everyone is a total moron.
And that’s where I sit. The house is in my name, also. Ain’t worth but maybe north of $80 grand, just guessing by the property tax valuation for here compared to what land sells for here. Nothing to sneeze at, anyway.
The plan is to just wait. Wait for the equal opportunity hires from the state to call… and the ESL lady that acted pissed off because I don’t answer the phone. And she got more attitude when i say “why would I answer a call from El Paso? Ever?” 🙂
The ball of yarn is almost wound up.
Ok, the Christmas movies are unique this year, Mel Gibson in “Fatman” on Dec 4:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z64XvPERZ50
“Bad Santa meets John Wick”
I wonder if Danny Glover is in the movie ?
The plan is to just wait. Wait for the equal opportunity hires from the state to call… and the ESL lady acted pissed off because I don’t answer the phone. And she got more attitude when i say “why would I answer a call from El Paso? Ever?”
Wait for what ?
The wife is still waiting for her father’s death certificate from the funeral home. The director did tell her that it would be at least 4 weeks due to the two state agencies being involved. She has notified Medicare, SS, and the VA. Since her father’s SS was not paid this year from March on, she is really wondering if she will ever see that money.
The wife has yet to find a probate lawyer to represent her and the estate. I suspect that she will have to go up to Carrollton and interview lawyers out of whatever passes for the phone book nowadays.
It looks more and more like that Carrollton dum-bro-crat mayoral candidate was getting mail-in ballots for all of the residents at the nursing home in Lewisville where my FIL was. There is only one nursing home in Lewisville that big that I know of.
https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2020/10/08/carrollton-mayoral-candidate-zul-mirza-mohamed-arrested-voter-fraud/
Head west on highway 110 from Forks and one will arrive at La Push on the coast. Spent three nights there to get away from everything for awhile. No TV, no cell service, no internet. At least not when I was there. Condo on the beach. I think there was a phone in the lobby at the Condo. Only a single restaurant and it was nothing to write home about. Really nothing in La Push except a few houses, RV park and some fishing facilities. I would return.
We went to Long Beach, WA once on a last minute Labor Day trip. Remote, but still fairly touristy.
The rental condo complex offered WiFi to compensate for the spotty cell service and minimal cable choices to entertain kids at night, but their capacity planning was as if Netflix didn’t exist and their ISP capped them at what I figured was ~ 2-3 GB/hr, which was quickly exahusted at the top of every hour.
God help them in the age of Baby Yoda.
I don’t know. This is my first rodeo with this stuff. I know it took two weeks to get her cremains. The death certs arrived a day later.
I haven’t notified anyone. SS seems to be doing that for me.
Mom died on the 30th. SS paid for September. Ditto her Mil retirement. SS pulled September and October back a day after they paid October. The Mil stuff pulled back two months last week.
Hey, she’s dead, I don’t have a problem with the deposits being reversed. She has about what I expected considering she was allowed $60/month and the electric and water bills for her house come out of that.
Shrug. I’m just going to wait and see what the EEO hires at Texas Medi-x decide to do. If they leave me alone, I’ll go to Edinburg, uh, April might be good, take Mom off of the deed, and list the place for sale as is. Totally “as is”, as you get the refrigerators and stove and whatever furniture is there and I ain’t fixing anything.
I might wait longer. If Medicaid decides they need the money from the sale of the house, well, they can deal with it. Yep, back to “first rodeo”.
“Disney Restructuring Emphasizes Digital Future; What Does It Mean for ESPN?”
https://www.outkick.com/disney-restructuring-emphasizes-digital-future-what-does-it-mean-for-espn/
“Disney announced a corporate restructuring today that CEO Bob Chapek says will “accelerate the transition to a real direct-to-consumer priority company” in the media business. What this means is a focused emphasis on their OTT streaming platforms, Disney+, ESPN+, and also Hulu.”
“Disney has had a number of business units hurt by the pandemic, including movies and theme parks. In California, Disney chairman Bob Iger is in a battle with governor Gavin Newsom where Disneyland cannot open even though Disney World has been open in Florida for months.”
Streaming is everything now. I expect Disney+ to be a lot more expensive in the near future. Especially as the theatres die.
https://hotair.com/headlines/archives/2020/10/tenet-killed-movies/
Streaming is everything now. I expect Disney+ to be a lot more expensive in the near future. Especially as the theatres die.
“Tentpole” movies need that $200 million kiss of domestic box office to offset at least part of their nine figure production costs before the flicks head to China, especially when the studios have bad product.
“Mulan” was a disaster.
ESPN was in trouble before the virus. The Mouse will have to decide whether it wants to keep the sports or write off the networks in a fire sale so they can keep the Fox catalog. Football comes up for renegotiation soon IIRC.
So, about that stove monitor…
Grandma scorched a pot this evening. While she and my wife were in the kitchen fiddling with a vacuum sealer, about four feet from the stove. I didn’t catch it because I was off doing something else; when I came in I immediately noticed the smell and arrowed to the kitchen, but my wife had just taken the pot off the stove. How one does not notice a boiled-down and burning pot just feet away is beyond me, but there you have it.
Annoyingly, the thermometer with the remotes and the alarm was right there and all set up and my wife and mother-in-law had agreed to give it a try and see if it did any good. But they didn’t use it.
-sigh-
I glanced at the links y’all provided and will look more closely in a bit. I checked the NYS Office of the Aging site and it’s about useless for the purpose I wanted, a checklist of things to look into. I’ve been thinking, and think that I need to put handholds up between Grandma’s bedroom and the downstairs bathroom and maybe one on the front porch, before winter. Buncha things I never needed to think about but someone needs to start thinking about now.
@paul
Did your mom have a will? If not, getting her name off the deed to the house will be a PITA.
Streaming is everything now. I expect Disney+ to be a lot more expensive in the near future. Especially as the theatres die.
Plus, if streaming gets too expensive, piracy will surge. I haven’t looked for “Mulan” on the torrent sites, but I’m not really interested.
Follow-up on yesterday… I’m watching airplanes on my PC! I’m using VirtualRadar. Setup was pretty easy. My location isn’t great. With the antenna in a front upstairs window I can “see” the planes to the NW and NE but not much else.
Longer term goal is to assign the USB stick to a linux VM so I don’t have to have extra programs running on my desktop PC.
Longer term goal is to assign the USB stick to a linux VM so I don’t have to have extra programs running on my desktop PC.
Be really careful with VirtualBox and the extension pack that enables USB 2.0/3.0. Don’t install the extension pack on a work PC unless your company has a license from Oracle for commercial use.
Oracle is aggressively monetizing everything which was legacy Sun.
I have successfully compiled/run dump1090 on a Raspberry Pi Model ‘B’. I use a DLink powered USB hub, with one of the 2 A ports powering the Pi and the other powering and providing the data link to the Realtek dongle to avoid problems. Everything very compact and easily hidden.
I have an ESXi server at home. All good.
“Analyst who nailed 2016: President is ‘going to absolutely crush the election'”
https://www.wnd.com/2020/10/analyst-nailed-2016-president-going-absolutely-crush-election/
‘A #Trumpslide if you will’
“McCullough forecasts 333 electoral votes for Trump and 208 for Joe Biden.”
Interesting.
Aren’t there only 538 electoral college votes ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_College
“Biden: Voters ‘don’t deserve’ to hear my position on packing Supreme Court”
https://www.wnd.com/2020/10/biden-voters-dont-deserve-hear-position-packing-court/
‘I’m not going to play his game,’ Joe says of Trump”
You know, there is arrogant and then there is just plain old stupid. This is a case of latter.
Well, it may be either the modelling or all the new electoral college votes that are needed to accommodate the dead voting.
@lynn: You know, there is arrogant and then there is just plain old stupid. This is a case of latter.
Embrace the healing power of “AND”.
Cloudless, smokeless, almost windless…I think i’ll drag out the telescope tonight.
@lynn: You know, there is arrogant and then there is just plain old stupid. This is a case of latter.
Embrace the healing power of “AND”.
I want the healing power of some new eyes !
And yes, Sleepy Joe is both arrogant AND stupid.
the smoke eater stuff my dad used he got from the fire department (he was a volunteer for decades). I’ve got some in little aerosol cans that look very commercial– https://www.amazon.com/Fire-After-Control-Aerosol-Ounce/dp/B00067IVDA?tag=ttgnet-20
I haven’t tried it, but their other products (one for the odor of ‘decomposition’) suggest it’s the real deal.
Cleaning every surface is important too. And paint may be needed to seal in the odor.
I’d give the Fire D a try.
n
(or take a sealed case of cookies down to your local fire house and ask them if they have a specific product they use.)
@ed, I’ve been watching some fairly big telescopes come thru my returns auctions…
Sky Watcher Classic 200 8-inch Telescope https://hibid.com/lot/74548870/sky-watcher-classic-200-8-inch-telescope?pn=3
the missing bases were in another auction last week at a different company. The boxes must have been in different wholesale lots….
n
@lynn, I like the word pulchritude because it sounds so very much the opposite of what it means!
and by the way, it’s past time for me to move on my self directed IRA. Didn’t you mention that you had one and were happy with the provider and process?
n
and by the way, it’s past time for me to move on my self directed IRA. Didn’t you mention that you had one and were happy with the provider and process?
Be careful, very careful. Several of the self directed IRA trustees in the USA went bankrupt in 2008. I have dealt with these guys in Alabama ? since 2011 and they are ok, not great. You really have to look out for yourself as they will not. They will only watch your assets and try to keep you from being stupid. Don’t worry, you can still do stupid things that they will required to report to the IRS should they find out.
https://irainnovations.com/
I’ve got well over six figures in my IRA with them in commercial real estate that has doubled in value since then. I turned down double what I paid for the property in 2017 ???. I am waiting for the County tollway authority to build a new bridge across the Brazos River before I sell the property. They are on their third redesign and should be in construction around 2030 or so. Maybe 2040.
My real estate agent buddy had a self directed IRA with a trustee here in Texas. He got a bunch of his buddies to invest their IRAs with him in condos down in Galveston (those big 10 ? 12 ? 15 ? story condo towers). I stayed out of it, just a little too much on the edge for me. He made a boatload of money in the early 2000s but got caught in a bankruptcy of a condo tower builder in 2008. The bankruptcy judge reached into all of their IRAs and took their condo money even though their condos were not finished. And since it was a bankruptcy, they did not get their deeds either. It was a financial disaster for all of them. And then the condo tower builder got to finish with a new bank loan and sell their condos again to somebody else. My real estate agent buddy was damaged very financially and decided to retire, mostly. We did one more transaction in 2011, three weeks before he passed away.
Like I said, be careful. I would not do anything in a self directed IRA that is crazy like borrow money to buy a property, that is tricky. Close transactions are extremely forbidden, don’t even think of doing anything that will benefit you or a relative personally by using your IRA (I got very close to that line in my initial transaction).
Nick, thanks for the Fire D. I might try it if we get more smoke next season. It’s almost over now.
Actually, our evap cooler removes a surprising amount of the odor, but it is running less now that the wx is cooler, and we get infiltration if there is wind pressure.
Another solution would be an electrostatic air filter, but I move a lot of air, too much for a reasonable sized filter. An air washer would probably be ideal, but those are uneconomically big.
BTW, I know a guy who has bought about a dozen rent houses in his self directed IRA. He has commercial loans on half of them which is tricky, very tricky. The loans are limited to 50% of the value and are held by his IRA (signed by the trustee). He retired about 15 ? years ago at age 50 ? and just goes around taking care of his rent houses. He does not make anything personally but his IRA gets the rent payments, etc. He is just the uncompensated manager of all the properties. I have not seen him in a couple of years so I have no idea how well he is doing.
I had a blast tonight at work. My internal LAN backup drive on my general file server (windoew 7 pro x64) ran out of space so I reformatted it and reinitialized the backup software on it. In the process, I noted that there were four updates from Mickeysoft waiting to be installed so I said why not and clicked ok. Big mistake. After the crash, the main drive came up with a bunch of weird chkdsk errors which it took about an hour to resolve. I figure that I was toast but then the server came up and looked ok. So I manually started the LAN backup (takes two days if nothing goes wrong and something always goes wrong) and went home. Maybe I will get lucky and nothing is corrupted.
Gall bladder surgery for husband took twice as long as scheduled. It was a nasty gangrenous mess and Dr worked his butt off. Home and resting. Glad I’m not a widow. Deeply grateful for modern medicine and insurance.
Husbands gall bladder announced itself with angry roar about 8 weeks ago. Husband was reluctant to have surgery and procrastinated. Dr said infection has been ramping up for last several weeks. I think my husband narrowly dodged a bullet.
Don’t wait on health stuff.
And Anchorage’s Mayor has been a naughty adulterous jerk and got caught. Friday thru today Anchorage has been immersed in bizarro world. I cannot wrap my head around the behaviors of any involved. Must Read Alaska and Alaska Landmine have stories if you care to visit the Peyton Place I call home.
Assembly is nonetheless planning on extending his mayoral emergency powers thru 12/31 and without public testimony on the topic. Also expecting Mayor to launch another lockdown.
@jenny, that is good news that the surgery seems to have gone well, and he’s in recovery mode now. My continued best wishes for his speedy recovery.
WRT politicians, it seems that the more they are in the public eye, the more shady stuff they get up to. Hopefully someone can leverage his misdeeds…. there is surely more to the story, more on the list. Cheaters never just cheat on one thing.
n
@nick: SW makes a decent scope i’ve heard, though i don’t own one myself.
I actually own a similar 8” dobsonian that i bought back in the 1980s from, i think, Odyssey. i retired it for a used C8, which weighs about 70#.
I bought a Nexstar 5se for my 64th a while back, as the weight of big scopes keeps them in the garage mostly.
smoke and clouds and winds have prevented much use this summer/fall but i put in two hours last night, and scratched the itch after months.
Sadly while transparency was decent, maybe 4, seeing was mediocre, couldn’t use much past 85x so mars wasn’t all that impressive, still the 5se was very nice.
Thanks Ed, And it turns out there are the correct bases in a different company’s auction later in the week. People must buy the scopes and return them when they can’t see planets as if from orbit… since the ‘scope ships in two boxes, they get separated and sold to different auction houses. And then they go for much less money, not being complete.
There’s no guarantee they are complete as it is, they could be missing the eyepiece for example. Still that is why they cost less, the gamble…
n
I’ve always been paranoid, probably why I got into IT Security. We know that smart phones and the cellular network are designed for convenience not security. Remote control of the microphone and camera are trivial. The state, and wealthy criminal organizations, have ghost cell “towers” to intercept calls. Governments have all the master keys to spoof every service provider that gives them ability to perform root level modifications. One reason why you NEVER take your personal or business phones into China. They WILL be hacked.
I carry a dumb flip phone.
I know that our intelligence agencies have the capability to track and identify every BLM / Antifa actor, read their texts, and record their calls. (Yes, I know they use encryption apps but keyboard loggers bypass all that) We used this technology to build a database of all actors and their contacts, creating a web of action in the Iraqi conflict. Someone in the intelligence community knows exactly who is controlling and funding the insurrection. The question is, who’s side are they on?