Sat. Nov. 21, 2020 – still in Houston

By on November 21st, 2020 in personal, Random Stuff, WuFlu

Cool, maybe a little rain, possible overcast, but generally nice.

Like yesterday.  I got the tiniest little spritz in the late afternoon, but otherwise a nice day.  Some sun, some warmth, shirtsleeves and shorts, no sweat dripping off my nose.

I am not feeling great, but still  have things to do, so I’ve been doing them.  More slowly to be sure, but still moving.  I took a couple of hundred pounds of scrap to the recycler after breaking down a bunch of electronics and a bunch of wiring harnesses.   I won’t get rich, but the stuff leaves, and I get some money back for it.  It does take time, but today paid me at better than $20/hr for the time.

Assuming that we can have our Hamfest in March, I’m planning to bring bins of salvaged electrical and electronic parts to the swapmeet.  I didn’t get a bunch of radios this year so I need something to sell, and I’ve got bins of “something” that need to leave.  The parts are things that seemed too good to just break up for recycle, like panel meters, power supply modules, connectors, fuse holders, stuff like that.  It sold well for me last year when I finally brought it out.  I’ve got spools of cable and wire too.  They always sell well when priced right.  Assuming we’re not in the middle of a guerrilla war, or facing terror attacks from the insurgency.

Plan and prepare for bad things, but continue living your life in case they don’t happen.

Still not feeling well.  Less of the sharpness in my lungs today, but still coughing and sore throat.  Still the feeling of being unwell.  No test results.  I did finally get the CVS online portal thing set up and working.  Some part of the process failed the first time, and I didn’t really get my account set up.  Now it is, and it says “no test results available”.  It also now says 3-4 days to process, up from 2-3.

Haven’t definitively called off the FL trip, but I’m 99% certain I better get a turkey defrosting here.

My third local auction company agreed to take a bunch of stuff on consignment next week.  I will fill up some bins for them.  My auction items seemed to sell well last night, but I haven’t seen final numbers yet.  I want them to do well so the auctioneer makes money and wants more of my stuff.  And I need to get it out of here.  The time from Thanksgiving to February historically has been a slow sales time for me, but maybe the old rules have changed.  I certainly hope so.

So much is changing now, or set to change dramatically, that it’s hard to plan for any specific outcome.  I’m trying to plan for the worst but still be ready if it doesn’t materialize.  My prepping can’t have irrevocable consequences.  That’s been one of my rules from the beginning.  That might change at some point, but for now, that’s bedrock.  It leaves a pretty broad range of choices still in most situations while hopefully protecting me from excess.   We’ll see I guess.

Meantime, I’m sleeping in a bit, then continuing to nibble away at the pile of stuff that needs doing.  Keep working the problem, keep learning, keep stacking.

 

nick

75 Comments and discussion on "Sat. Nov. 21, 2020 – still in Houston"

  1. Greg Norton says:

    Assuming that we can have our Hamfest in March, I’m planning to bring bins of salvaged electrical and electronic parts to the swapmeet.

    This Hamfest? I’m not a Ham enthusiast beyond the Realtek tinkering, but I always see cool things at the shows. Ham/Linux have a huge overlap. I’m guessing Raspberry Pi and Beagle Bone are in the mix as well these days — the Raspberry Pi 400 should be in a lot of hands by March.

    http://houstonhamfest.org/

    That’s halfway to Austin. 🙂

  2. Greg Norton says:

    AT&T has run fiber at the front of the 14 acres that the office building is on, at the back, about 1,000 foot. They are willing to run fiber to the office for free for just $1,000/month for 10/10 mbps ethernet. Higher speeds to 1/1 gbps are available for more bucks. So far I have told them not only no, but hell no.

    You don’t have a little outbuilding where the fiber runs? What are the climate control requirements for the … modem (?) terminating the fiber link?

    1000 ft. They’ll probably bring in a surplus Uverse “fiber to the curb” cabinet with AC and run Ethernet beyond the theoretical limits. They did that to us at the last job with a toll site in North Texas that had 1200 feet between the fiber termination point and the plaza. Speed wasn’t as much an issue as timeouts initiating the camera FTP connections via libcURL — connection timeout had to be really generous.

    I imagine you could do a lot better than 10 Mbps with WiFi and a directional antenna to a hotspot bridged to the fiber/modem. I have a marine mount WiFi ‘N’ hotspot with military grade omni antenna you are welcome to try.

    Sadly, my unusued 7 db gain directional antenna disappeared from my cube at the last job after I was fired. I’m not going to fuss about it because the botched cleanout of my space by personnel not in my management chain, supervised by the office manager, created a legal tarbaby for the company if they ever realize that they are missing my engineering notebooks.

    “I have no idea where those went; maybe they are *with my antenna*. Ask the office manager.”

  3. brad says:

    Ach, I shouldn’t get upset about these things, but…seriously? There’s a /. article about how lots of big IT organizations are subscribing to an “inclusivity framework”, which dictates how you use language.

    You obviously can’t use terms like master/slave, because they are racist. Who is so uneducated that they think slavery was ever restricted to one race?

    You can’t use violent terms, like “killing” a process, because…well, I guess the snowflakes get scared?

    You can’t use terms that have any sort of military connotations, like “marshal/unmarshal”, because…heck if I know why.

    Hey, at least they have said that “binary” remains acceptable, despite the plethora of sexual identities out there. I’m sure that will change, though – someone, somewhere will find a way to be offended.

    Oh, don’t miss the greatest snowflakiness of all: Rocks are racist.

  4. Ray Thompson says:

    Not sure if the last one I bought was marine-grade.

    Marine grade is blue in color. There should be lots of it available in your area as there are many boats, a shipyard with all manner of boats in repair across from Safeway and McDonalds.

    I don’t know if stabil works with kerosene, but I’m not sure it’s needed.

    It’s not. The Stabil absorbs the water that is attracted to the alcohol in the gas. Plus probably a few other things such as keeping the gas from gelling for a longer period of time.

    in-wall toaster

    That’s something I have never seen before. Good luck on the intercom. The problem may be simple. With friends that know stuff about analog electronics you may have an interesting project. I would still put my money on bad electrolyte capacitors in the power supply.

    many years ago I was hired by a church to provide lighting

    The lighting in my church is horrible. Very uneven. Not because of not enough lights, but many of the bulbs have failed. No one in the church wants to go up into the ceiling and replace the bulbs. Very nice dimmer board, controls the spots, floods and the house lights. 48 channels (I think) with scene settings.

    Very few of the controls actually control anything except for the master. It’s not an equipment problem, it’s the lights with burned out bulbs and many of the controllers are not addressed properly to match the board. Really messed up and I have complained for several years.

    The church has hired a company a company to make everything work. The company will replace all the bulbs and get all the lights (hot wire, all of them) working, the controllers working, and the board properly configured. The company is doing this for $7,000.00, a bargain.

    But, the company wants the long term, about two years for fund raising, project of replacing all the lights with LED, replace the controllers and replace the master control panel. That project has been said to be about $140K to do everything. The same company doing the temporary repairs will be the same company (Bandit Lighting) will be doing the conversion project. Bandit Lighting has done some major projects for theatres in Pigeon Forge and elsewhere. They have also lit major concerts. I think they have little work and anything right now is welcome. I suspect they are doing the temporary repairs at a loss to get, and keep, the church’s business.

  5. SteveF says:

    No employer or client has ever required that I keep engineering notebooks describing my work on the job. So far as I recall, no team lead or manager has ever even suggested it. A number required that I keep track of the time spent on different projects but that was solely for billing purposes.

    Consequently, my notebooks are mine. I paid for the notebooks and the pens and the chore of keeping notes was on top of getting my work done and was a chore my coworkers did not do and therefore was not part of my assigned duties. Depending on the terms of my leaving a gig, I might make a copy for my team lead or my replacement if they asked for it. That happened approximately once. If they knew about the notebooks and demanded them after firing me, they got butthurt at my refusal, which happened twice that I recall, and once threatened me with a lawsuit.

    I probably could have used my notebooks to contest a patent. I’d come up with something on the job and filled out the paperwork as required, putting in my name as the inventor. Not long after that I was fired. (For not pulling a second all-nighter on top of the regular day work, to fix someone else’s screwup; I’ve mentioned this before.) Sometime after that it came to my attention that the patent had been awarded but my name was removed from the application and the owner’s name put in. I could have contested it but that would have cost thousands and I wouldn’t have gained anything material and the odds were against the business owner being punished for the misrepresentation.

  6. SteveF says:

    “inclusivity framework”, which dictates how you use language

    Ha! That’s been floated at work, where I’m approximately the only employee who isn’t a libtard. I think I derailed, at least for the moment, it by stating in front of the entire technical group, that anyone who gets upset about references to master and slave databases is too stupid to be technically capable and probably still wets the bed.

    In case you were wondering, no, I don’t make any effort at all to get along with the soybois, libtards, and SJWs.

    9
    1
  7. Greg Norton says:

    No employer or client has ever required that I keep engineering notebooks describing my work on the job. So far as I recall, no team lead or manager has ever even suggested it. A number required that I keep track of the time spent on different projects but that was solely for billing purposes.

    My notebooks at the last job degenerated into time cards, but even information like that has uses in patent disputes and other legal situations in which the company often found itself involved. Some large metro customers didn’t even pay for contracted work until after the lawsuit was filed.

    Every offer letter I’ve signed going back to my first job specified that my notes were the property of the employer and would be retained by management as part of the exit process.

  8. Greg Norton says:

    Ach, I shouldn’t get upset about these things, but…seriously? There’s a /. article about how lots of big IT organizations are subscribing to an “inclusivity framework”, which dictates how you use language.

    The problem at the last job wasn’t really the f-bombs I dropped in the meeting. Violating their newly adopted “Respect in the Workplace” framework gave management an excuse to work out grudges they had with me going back to my interview process, and even that was a stretch.

    I have no idea as to why I was hired … or retained on the payroll for 2 1/2 years. Based on calls she overheard, my wife suspects my management was on T therapy which would explain much. Weed may not be legal in Austin, but a lot of people are tripping on prescription meds — Adderall and T therapy for males, Welbutrin and other antidepressants for women.

    The new job is … okay, but nobody yells. That is a huge improvement.

  9. Ed says:

    A SpaceX launch – and landing – from Vandenberg in a couple of hours. I’m in Ventura on other business and will try to go to the beach to watch – not sure if those are officially open though.

  10. Nick Flandrey says:

    Ok, out of bed. Still not feeling great. Sore throat is worse. Haven’t coughed yet, but have only been up and moving for 10 minutes.

    @harold, Bandit is a very well known and well regarded company. Everyone in entertainment industry is hurting BAD. All the rental houses (and Bandit is one) count on having all their gear out on rental to pay for it, and that’s not happening. Some of them don’t even have enough warehouse space to HOLD all their gear, because some of it is always out, until it’s not… LED based fixtures and new control is the way to go. Depending on the work and gear list, $147K sounds cheap. I’ll see if my wife can pull their numbers- she can if they got a quote from one of the companies she reps, you’re in her territory. You have a need for video lighting too, not just ‘bump and flash’ or light that looks good in person. The great advantage of LED is lamp life, and not needing dimming. The disadvantage is they use up more control channels than just one for a dimmer, so your existing control might not be large enough. Send me an email with the name of the church and the address….

    n

  11. Nick Flandrey says:

    WRT engineering notebooks, I used to use a legal pad specifically because it wasn’t a notebook, and I was told it couldn’t be subpoenaed or considered part of my work output.

    That said, a couple of years ago I did provide background to an attorney in a lawsuit involving an installation I ran, based on my legal pad notes. I was the only one involved that still had my notes, all the companies had gone out of business and the original designer of the gear had died. I was a little bit helpful to the defense.

    n

  12. SteveF says:

    My notebooks were always a memory aid for myself rather than for any legal purpose. They’d hold anything from the list of compiler flags to make a library to the fact that the file server had to be rebooted twice today, the latter being a crude way of tracking system problems and pointing out to managers that they need to find some money to replace some hardware, or whatever. Over time I started making note of when I showed a coworker how to fetch code from version control, say, or that I gave him a list of all of the currently used ports so that he’d know what not to use for whatever he was making. It didn’t take long to find out that, in a dispute, showing that I had notes of having told Tim a month ago that he should not use port 8089 did no good whatsoever because “you could write anything in your notebook and how do we know you actually did it”. OK, fine, you dingleberries. I’m not going to fix Tim’s screwup and I don’t care if you want to blame me for Tim’s carelessness and stupidity.

    Mostly, though, the notes are lists of picky details, things taken care of and things yet to be done, and sometimes a bit of discussion about why I implemented something in a particular fashion and why the other three approaches didn’t work.

  13. Ray Thompson says:

    You have a need for video lighting too, not just ‘bump and flash’ or light that looks good in person

    If the lights look good in person the lights will look OK on the broadcast. We do not want the “studio” look on the lights but prefer more natural. There are already lights in the balcony directed at the platform plus lights overhead attached to a light bar and slightly behind the pulpit. The lighting was excellent at one time until the bulbs started failing and no one would replace the bulbs. Factor in a messed up light controller, and no one that cared, it has become a mess.

    The overhead balcony lights are about 40 degrees angled down to the stage. Nice 60 degree arc on the lighting. There are also two side spot lights that provide rim lighting for the speaker.

    Replacing those lights with LED would produce roughly the same effect, a well lit, and evenly lit, stage. Toss in a few LEDs that can change color and it will look good.

    Send me an email with the name of the church and the address….

    I am not in charge of the process. Four quotes have already been requested and received and Bandit lighting was chosen for several reasons. Reputation. Cost. Proposal. Expertise. As I indicated the initial “make what we have work” is to get their foot in the door and give the church time to raise funds. The process is in motion and adding anything else to the process will serve no purpose. Thanks for the offer.

    A couple of the proposals were really bizarre. Light bars vertically mounted on the side of the stage pointed in. Nothing like harsh rim lighting. Might be OK for a disco but not for a church.

  14. Nick Flandrey says:

    @harold, my wife says it’s out of her territory anyway. Bandit is well respected and all the big guys also have a fixed installation/church department. Churches are big money in the lighting/sound/av business.

    My wife does warn against being locked into particular gear or pricing if the fund raising will take some time. New stuff with new capability comes on the market all the time, and prices do tend to decrease over time. Fixing what you already have is not a bad place to start if your timeline is more than a few months.

    n

  15. SteveF says:

    Might be OK for a disco but not for a church.

    No reason one place can’t be both.

    Dunky Town — Baptisms with dancers in the background
    Stayin’ Alive — Prayers for the elderly or the sickly. With dancers in the background.
    Hot Stuff and Bad Girl — Warnings to act right. With dancers.
    The Hustle — Passing the collection plate with dancers doing the collection.

    Done right, you could have a very popular channel.

  16. Nick Flandrey says:

    Depending on the project, my notes were part TODO list and part running log of work done and by who. VERY importantly, I would always jot down any impromptu meetings, where/when/who/what was discussed. Easy during a busy day to forget that you told someone it would be ok if they did xyz on Thursday. Or the opposite. I did a lot of site management work so I was more concerned about interaction and scheduling.

    n

  17. RickH says:

    For those looking for a bug-out place….there’s a new listing here in the Pacific NW. Just across the water (roughly) from me.

    The 59-acre property, just north of Lake Hancock on Whidbey’s western coast, spans three densely wooded parcels. The residence has bullet-resistant walls, a safe room and an underground escape tunnel to the woods. A massive concrete tank holds 17,000 gallons of propane. In the 9,000-square-foot shop, three shipping containers are stocked with emergency supplies that can be supplemented by the huge, adjacent working farm.

    “Toilet paper is hard to find. But there’s a lot of it there,” said listing agent Forbes Hansen. A video for the listing shows TP piled to the ceiling.

    Listing price is $6 million. Property address is hidden, but I bet someone with a bit of Google Earth skills could figure it out from the video in the story.

    https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/for-sale-6-million-whidbey-island-survival-bunker-stocked-to-withstand-a-pandemic/

  18. Nick Flandrey says:

    Yep and they blew the usefulness of the escape tunnel…

    n

  19. Greg Norton says:

    For those looking for a bug-out place….there’s a new listing here in the Pacific NW. Just across the water (roughly) from me.

    According to the story, the previous owner, the PetSmart CEO, bugged out to Idaho.

    We lived in Vancouver, WA for four years before escaping in 2014. The I-5 corridor and the Columbia Gorge west of The Dalles have always struck me as having high potential to be Prog Central in a SHTF situation … that is until the rampaging Canadian cannibal gangs show up from BC.

    As is, the I-5 corridor between the Columbia River and Olympia features a lot of poverty. There can only be so many state/federal agencies and Native American casinos on the freeway providing jobs.

  20. Ray Thompson says:

    Fixing what you already have is not a bad place to start if your timeline is more than a few months.

    We are looking at about two years into the future. Price is no fixed. We needed a good estimate to start the fund raising as all church fund raisings need a target to get past the committees, the people that like to micro-manage and who are basically clueless.

    No reason one place can’t be both.

    That would kill most of the older people. There is a church close to us that is close to disco. Lots of lights with motion, fog machine, loud music naturally. Only thing missing is a lighted floor and who knows, they may have one it and it was turned off the day I visited. I personally did not enjoy the place.

  21. RickH says:

    $6mil seems like a bargain, especially if furnishing/tools/supplies are included. Even includes a caretaker cottage.

    Although there’s a lot of labor needed to maintain everything, including gardening/farming. Not for an old guy like me.

    The video is interesting, though.

  22. Nick Flandrey says:

    Seems like a recipe for a ‘last stand’ before losing it all to the vast number of marauders attracted to it.

    n

  23. lynn says:

    “Death penalty and the Race Card: Tired Old Game”
    https://gunfreezone.net/death-penalty-and-the-race-card-tired-old-game/

    “Orlando Hall was executed last night.”

    “But who is was Orlando Hall and what did he do to deserve the unjustified fury of an obviously racist All White Jury?”

    Oh yeah, I want this scumbag walking the streets. This guy was our worst walking nightmare.

  24. lynn says:

    AT&T has run fiber at the front of the 14 acres that the office building is on, at the back, about 1,000 foot. They are willing to run fiber to the office for free for just $1,000/month for 10/10 mbps ethernet. Higher speeds to 1/1 gbps are available for more bucks. So far I have told them not only no, but hell no.

    You don’t have a little outbuilding where the fiber runs? What are the climate control requirements for the … modem (?) terminating the fiber link?

    Nope. The fiber is buried in the ground at the front ditch along FM 2759. They would have to install a hot tap. I have no idea what the tap would look like and if it would need an air conditioned building for the tap.
    https://www.google.com/maps/place/WinSim+Inc./@29.535472,-95.667719,753m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m13!1m7!3m6!1s0x8640e39f672f8369:0xd643dd2fb920f337!2s8653+FM+2759+Rd,+Richmond,+TX+77469!3b1!8m2!3d29.5329453!4d-95.666926!3m4!1s0x8640e3a1c78e971f:0x879386fb6744aa76!8m2!3d29.5363894!4d-95.666357

    My 25 pair phone cable is directly pulled one mile using the power poles from the CO (common office with a 10,000 ??? 100,000 ??? phone line switch) in Booth, Texas all the way into my office building.

  25. ~jim says:

    I’m going to downvote WinSim Inc. on Google… just because. 🙂

    Anyone know of mechanical watch w/tritium tubes which can be replaced? I’ve gotten a few nice Milspec watchs from Marathon over the years but the tritium wears out. Then they changed the design to something I don’t care for. I’d pay to get one so I just need to replace the tubes.

    Had an old Omega Seamaster for twenty+ years into which I dumped enough money to support a third world country. Finally said to hell with it but learned a few lessons.

    1. A good watchmaker. One guy stole a micro-adjuster and another guy rendered it unwatertight by boring out the stem hole because he couldn’t find the right part. Didn’t even ask me first…

    2. Buy extra parts when and if you can find them. Never could find an original crown for that thing after I snapped the first one off. Should have kept an extra crystal and gasket in reserve, too.

  26. Nick Flandrey says:

    ~jim, the parts problem is artificial. One large group of companies changed their policy on who could buy parts, and suddenly you’re paying $1000 for a clean and service after sending the watch to the factory facility instead of paying ~$300 to someone who lives in your community. The factory authorized facilities will often just swap parts, and steal your old parts, which destroys the “originality” of a watch, which is important to some people.

    That could change with a policy change.

    n

  27. lynn says:

    _Through Fiery Trials: A Novel in the Safehold Series (Safehold, 10)_ by David Weber
    https://www.amazon.com/Through-Fiery-Trials-Novel-Safehold/dp/0765364646/?tag=ttgnet-20

    Book number ten in a ten book space opera science fiction series. I read the well printed and well bound MMPB. I hope that there will be an eleventh book in the series as there are no published plans at the moment that I can find.

    David Weber sells his books by the pound. One has to get past that when reading his books. His books have characters of thousands and details by the ton.

    The book leads off with more details about the Ghaba, the murderers of the human race. The Ghaba found an outlying human outpost in 2378 and by 2430 all fourteen systems of the human race, including Sol and Terra have been destroyed. Before this, Safehold was established in 2421 with eight million colonists over 400 light years away from Earth.

    Book ten starts with the world war between the Holy Church and the Empire of Charis has been won by Charis using a technology jump from 15th century weapons and transportation to 19th century technology and weapons via an AI stored away nine centuries earlier. The world is rebuilding and trying to steal the new Charis technology which Charis is trying to give away for free !

    BTW, David Weber has already written one potential end of the Safehold story at:
    http://www.davidweber.net/posts/443-how-safehold-wont-end.html

    My rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    Amazon rating: 3.9 out of 5 stars (780 reviews)

  28. lynn says:

    I’m going to downvote WinSim Inc. on Google… just because.

    You would not be the first. That can be fixed if you gripe enough at Google when the rating is not legit but a personal vendetta. Lawyers were not involved yet.

  29. lynn says:

    Might be OK for a disco but not for a church.

    No reason one place can’t be both.

    Dunky Town — Baptisms with dancers in the background
    Stayin’ Alive — Prayers for the elderly or the sickly. With dancers in the background.
    Hot Stuff and Bad Girl — Warnings to act right. With dancers.
    The Hustle — Passing the collection plate with dancers doing the collection.

    Done right, you could have a very popular channel.

    Steve Martin would be pleased ! “Leap of Faith (film)”. Recommended.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_of_Faith_(film)

  30. paul says:

    I seem to have fixed the calendar on my phone. Showing made-up holidays like Black History Month, Native American Heritage Day, and Cinco de Mayo…… made up, to me, but not anything like Christmas, Easter, 4th of July, is pretty annoying. Yeah, I’m turning into an old fart.

    So. From my PC, on Google Play, I added “Christian Holidays” and “Phases of the Moon”. Removed “Holidays in the United States”. Piddled with the phone, added “Holidays in the United States” and wa la !!!

    “Christian Holidays” and “Phases of the Moon” are still options on the phone. Just not displayed.

    Most of the sites offering help are useless. Delete my Google account from the phone and add it back? Reset the phone back to factory? Yeah, I bet they are laughing their butts off thinking folks will reset to factory.

  31. ~jim says:

    You would not be the first.

    I was joking. But where has the passive pusillanimous pantywaist who used to downvote everything gone? Someone’s got to do it.

    I seem to have fixed the calendar on my phone. Showing made-up holidays like Black History Month, Native American Heritage Day, and Cinco de Mayo……

    That’s like my current bloody Kindle! I don’t hold anything against the Netherlands (at least during daylight hours…) but why on Earth do I have a Dutch/English dictionary and why the hell can’t I get rid of it?

  32. Geoff Powell says:

    I use a Casio WaveCeptor, the WVA430U, which can set itself from radio transmissions, MSF Anthorn, or DCF Germany, if you please. Rather like this one, although mine doesn’t have the seconds bezel.

    It’s my second WaveCeptor. The first broke one of the bracelet mounts (plastic!) which is irreparable.

    >

  33. drwilliams says:

    @SteveF
    Sometime after that it came to my attention that the patent had been awarded but my name was removed from the application and the owner’s name put in. I could have contested it but that would have cost thousands and I wouldn’t have gained anything material and the odds were against the business owner being punished for the misrepresentation.

    I would have had an attorney contact the company and indicate a willingness to spend the thousands unless a suitable settlement could be reached. Aside from the adverse publicity, in some areas of patent law the examiners are a smallest group with longish memories.

    My last patent was my last because when it was issued it had an extra name on it. When I queried my co-inventor he admitted that he knew. I did not ask if he had fudged any notebook entries to support it, but I quit using the official documentation system and never looked back.

  34. paul says:

    I’m sort of bored. Ok, what to do with bacon grease?

    Pretty much anywhere you would use butter or salad oil. I’m already there, the bottle of corn oil in my fridge is at least two years old.

    Bacon grease instead of butter in pie crust? Chocolate Meringue pie with a hint of bacon? Pass.

    Mayonnaise. Melted bacon grease instead of oil. Might taste good but will the mayo set up solid?

    Candles. Ok, this sort of makes sense when folks say to stick a wick into a can of Crisco. Me? Not a fan of candles. I’m sort of scared of fire.

    Feed it to the chickens or dogs? Well, if I still had chickens and more dogs than Precious Penny Poo Puppy (who is err, matronly) drizzling cooking grease on the critter feed is a no brainer. And I wouldn’t have 10 pints and 2 quarts of bacon grease in the fridge if I had chickens and six dogs.

    Winter is coming. Maybe a bit on the cat food.

    A lot of the suggestions are generic. You can use Crisco or Wesson oil.

    Make soap. At first glance you boil the bacon grease in salted water to clean it, I suppose better than a paper towel filter. Bizarre. She overdid it and made soap that smelled like chicken stock. I’ll read it all again. Making soap is not on my To Do List as long as I can buy Ivory.

    Mom and Dad made soap once. Once. End of that experiment.

    Waste not, want not. I think I’m going to fill something, mixed nuts containers, with bacon grease and to the trash… maybe out to the back of the place…. no, to the trash. No need to encourage the raccoons.

    Added: Using in a deep fryer is not mentioned anywhere.

  35. SteveF says:

    drwilliams, the employer owned the rights to the patent, no question about that — it was developed (mostly) on work time based on something that came up at work, so I was to assign the patent to the employer. I don’t recall any requirement that the company give a bonus to the inventor of the patent, though that was normally done. I didn’t stand to benefit financially from the challenge and at best I’d have had my name on a patent that was assigned to my (previous) employer. At the time I had a mortgage, an infant, and an unemployed wife, and scraping up the lawyer money with no expectation of benefitting wasn’t a wise choice.

  36. drwilliams says:

    Researchers at St. Jude’s have identified the mechanism of the fatal cytokine storm that is responsible for many Wuhan coronavirus deaths:

    https://www.stjude.org/media-resources/news-releases/2020-medicine-science-news/in-the-lab-st-jude-scientists-identify-possible-covid-19-treatment.html

    and the interesting bit is that it can be treated with existing drugs:

    Neutralizing antibodies against TNF-alpha and IFN-gamma are currently used to treat inflammatory diseases in the clinic. The investigators found that treatment with these antibodies protected mice from death associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection, sepsis, HLH and cytokine shock.

    Proposed Experiment:
    1) Choose two identical realities from the current Terran spacetime
    2) Reality A: President Trump ignores the news
    3) Reality B: President Trump brings the manufacturers into Operation Warp Speed and makes the two therapies available free of charge
    4) Plot time series of fatalities for A and B and compare

  37. SteveF says:

    paul, I wouldn’t put the bacon grease in the trash.

    I use it in making bread instead of butter. (Though not in place of olive oil for types of bread that call for that; texture comes out odd and the taste is definitely wrong.)

    If you ever make StoveTop stuffing or the like, bacon grease does work, but the taste is strange. The stuffing seasonings were selected for butter.

    If I find myself with too much bacon grease, Grandma puts it in the compost heap to spread on the garden. It seems questionable to me but probably doesn’t hurt anything.

    If none of the above fits your needs, give it to the animals. You can scrape it out and plop it in the forest or something to keep it away from your house and trash cans. I set out lots of bones, trimmings, and miscellaneous food waste that Grandma doesn’t want for the compost. The animals appreciate all of it. I haven’t noticed any problem with raccoons and canines (not sure whether they’re feral dogs, coyotes, or what) coming up to the house.

  38. paul says:

    Ok, I’ll empty my jars of bacon grease into some kind of pan that I can put out for the critters. Maybe not all at once. Oh, heck, yeah, all at once. I fed the cats at the feed shed in Pyrex pie plates and they vanished. Finally found one pie plate a couple of months ago.

    I’ll figure it out. Feed the critters….. as for the cats that eat by the back door, a tablespoon glopped from jar onto their food should work.

  39. RickH says:

    Interesting article on how Duke University has been able to continue with in-person classes while not having problems with Covid-19 infections.

    https://news.yahoo.com/duke-university-schools-country-stay-140009182.html

  40. Nick Flandrey says:

    @paul, if you are getting too much grease and can’t use it all, you need to buy a better grade of bacon. I buy HCF from HEB because I use the extra in cooking some things.

    I use bacon fat in the pan when I cook eggs in the morning.
    I use bacon fat in my cast iron when I want to brown some meat before slow cooking.
    I use bacon fat to fry apple slices as a side with pork. (1/2inch thick rings in at least 1/4 inch fat)
    I use bacon fat to fry potato slices for breakfast or dinner. Cubed potatoes too.

    If I burn it or it picks up flavor, I solidify it in a soup can and throw it out. Otherwise I add it back to my bacon fat can on the counter. On the rare occasions that the bacon doesn’t taste great, I don’t save that fat. Into a can and the trash it goes.

    Because we’ve been eating so much HCF cheaper bacon, my stored fat is getting ahead of me, and I’ve been putting it in canning jars and into the freezer.

    Anywhere you’d use lard, you can use bacon fat. White, clean fat.

    n

    And I usually pour my little dog’s dry food into the breakfast egg frying pan after I’m done and shake it around to coat the kibble with whatever little bacon fat is left in the pan. Hasn’t done him any harm in 10 years, and he loves it. He’s very sleek and shiny.

    n

  41. Nick Flandrey says:

    bacon fat is a good lube for cornbread pans, but I re-coat my cast iron with clean peanut oil before storing it.

    n

  42. drwilliams says:

    @SteveF
    I understand the practical aspects. Note that I responded to my own situation with no action, also.

    Falsification of a patent application is grounds for nullifying or revoking the patent. Also makes heap big stink and black eyes accrue to middle management who made very poor decisions.

    Prior to the story related above, I was in a meeting about 35 years ago when a PhD got up and took credit for a process that he didn’t invent, under the benevolent gaze of middle management that knew better. I was sitting next to the real inventors, two talented guys without degrees. Walked out of the meeting with them, got a discreet distance, and asked WTFF? Was told that, yes, they knew it was coming, but were told it was necessary to get internal funding support for [redacted].

    From that point forward I kept my own records.

  43. MrAtoz says:

    Telling the *Man* to shove it in Buffalo:

    ‘Go get a warrant’: Business owners in Buffalo win a standoff with state ‘health inspector’ (video)

    About time.

    LET THE HEELING END!

  44. paul says:

    Sweet. I’m too cheap to buy it. 🙂

  45. paul says:

    if you are getting too much grease and can’t use it all, you need to buy a better grade of bacon.

    Wrights bacon. Two slices a day. The fried eggs don’t use a lot of bacon grease.

    But yeah, I get the point of “cheap mostly fat bacon”.

  46. drwilliams says:

    @paul
    That aluminum canister was part of a set that was common in the 1950’s/60’s.

    If you don’t strain the hot grease, the dark bits will fall to the bottom. Spoon the clean grease off the top. I prefer to store it in the refrigerator in a closed container.

  47. Nick Flandrey says:

    I’m pretty careful when I pour to leave the bits in the bottom of the pan. Even so, every once in a while I put the grease can on a hot burner when I’m done cooking and let it melt the whole contents. Any bits fall to the bottom then.
    n

  48. Nick Flandrey says:

    “Get Out! – Go Get a Warrant!” – Business Owners in Buffalo, New York Stand Up to Cuomo’s Covid Orders, Kick Out Sheriff and “Health Inspector

    –what’s next? Midnight no knock raid? Masked para military crews kicking in doors at 4am?

    Pushback will rile up TPTB, who will authorize increasing levels of force, until someone gets killed.

    n

  49. drwilliams says:

    There is a story making the rounds with youtube video that purports to show how Dominion software alters voting totals.
    It can be found with search using keywords:
    “edward solomon” dominion

    At present the search works on DDG and Google, and the videos are on youtube. Be interesting to see if that changes.

  50. Mark W says:

    They are willing to run fiber to the office for free for just $1,000/month for 10/10 mbps ethernet. Higher speeds to 1/1 gbps are available for more bucks. So far I have told them not only no, but hell no.

    I’ve never heard of the term “hot tap”. What they do is dig, select a pair, splice it to the drop cable to your office, then seal up the splice, mark it and re-bury. At the upstream, they plug that pair into a switch and you’re done. Your office gets a fiber panel and a CPE device. Not a big deal and not worthy of $1000 for 10Mbps.

    Burying the fiber along your property is the most expensive part, but they do that with a trenching machine that makes it easy.

    Ask them for separate quotes for the construction and service. Then haggle. They are trying to make you pay for the entire fiber cable, not just your part of it.

  51. SteveF says:

    If you have excess bacon fat, or any drippings, get rid of it by heating it until it’s liquid and then pouring it down the kitchen sink. #FollowMeForMoreLifeTips

  52. drwilliams says:

    @SteveF
    Bet you’re one of those guys that uses both sides of the toilet paper.

  53. SteveF says:

    Indeed! And I put the toilet paper down the kitchen sink after I’ve used it twice!

  54. lynn says:

    They are willing to run fiber to the office for free for just $1,000/month for 10/10 mbps ethernet. Higher speeds to 1/1 gbps are available for more bucks. So far I have told them not only no, but hell no.

    I’ve never heard of the term “hot tap”. What they do is dig, select a pair, splice it to the drop cable to your office, then seal up the splice, mark it and re-bury. At the upstream, they plug that pair into a switch and you’re done. Your office gets a fiber panel and a CPE device. Not a big deal and not worthy of $1000 for 10Mbps.

    Burying the fiber along your property is the most expensive part, but they do that with a trenching machine that makes it easy.

    Ask them for separate quotes for the construction and service. Then haggle. They are trying to make you pay for the entire fiber cable, not just your part of it.

    Hot Tap is where you make a tap into an operating line. They do it with electric lines and natural gas lines. I also used the same term for the tapping into a fiber line since I did not know a term.

    So they will need to run the fiber all the way into my office building with a fiber termination point. I figured as much. I figure that they will probably cut my 25 pair copper line that runs into my office building as they want to replace my five copper lines with five voip boxes.

  55. lynn says:

    “Get Out! – Go Get a Warrant!” – Business Owners in Buffalo, New York Stand Up to Cuomo’s Covid Orders, Kick Out Sheriff and “Health Inspector”

    –what’s next? Midnight no knock raid? Masked para military crews kicking in doors at 4am?

    Pushback will rile up TPTB, who will authorize increasing levels of force, until someone gets killed.

    n

    This is a result of The War On Some Drugs which has militarized the police. Not good for the general populace.

  56. Ray Thompson says:

    And I put the toilet paper down the kitchen sink after I’ve used it twice!

    Bunch of Saturday night degenerates.

  57. Ray Thompson says:

    I fail to see where a health inspector has any legal right to confront a business that does not serve food. Same as I don’t see where the local health department has any right to create and enforce any rules. None of these people are sworn law enforcement. And certainly none of them are not in a position to make any laws. That is the job of the legislature. Not even the governor can legally make laws, especially those that carry a fine. These people are overstepping their authority. I don’t know what is worse. People that overstep their authority or those that let them overstep.

    Especially that facist governor Kate Brown in Oregon. She has threatened to have people arrested who have gatherings for Thanksgiving. That would seriously overwhelm the police and the jail system. It is time for people in Oregon to tell Kate Brown to stuff it.

  58. Marcelo says:

    She has threatened to have people arrested who have gatherings for Thanksgiving.

    Aren’t they reducing police everywhere? They should make up their minds…

  59. lynn says:

    “100+ Antifa Rioters Vandalized Portland Buildings — No Arrests”
    https://www.breitbart.com/law-and-order/2020/11/21/100-antifa-rioters-vandalized-portland-buildings-no-arrests/

    Something is really wrong with our country.

    I wonder if it is fixable.

    Hat tip to:
    https://thelibertydaily.com/

  60. Greg Norton says:

    “100+ Antifa Rioters Vandalized Portland Buildings — No Arrests”

    Something is really wrong with our country.

    NE Sandy and the Hollywood District. There will be hell to pay at the Mayor’s office on Monday. Those are the very neighborhoods who supported Wheeler’s reelection.

  61. Nick Flandrey says:

    The search brought up the youtube video, and between then and now the views increased by 2000. It’ll go away soon.

    n

  62. Nick Flandrey says:

    What’s missing from the guys video is the mechanism.

    He seems to be saying that the count tabs are corrected to match a predetermined ratio, but where are the number coming from? If a count worker puts 100 ballots thru, and they are all for Trump, none for biden, the ratio just discards the T votes? or adds biden votes? In either case, the number of total votes wouldn’t match the number of ballots stuff thru the machine. Or is he saying that there aren’t physical ballots, and the machine is just stuffing numbers into the reported data stream? I’ve missed something or he’s missed something.

    I get that he’s saying the data stream appears to be manipulated, or even entirely false, but how would that be accomplished?

    n

    BTW, I don’t think anyone trying to convince someone from a political motivation could be that disengaged emotionally, and boring. So he is convincing that he believes there is something in his analysis, I just don’t understand the bigger point of how it’s happening.

  63. lynn says:

    The search brought up the youtube video, and between then and now the views increased by 2000. It’ll go away soon.

    ???

  64. drwilliams says:

    COVIDGATE: the Corruption of Clinical Trials (Part One)
    Michelle Malkin • November 17, 2020
    “Vaccinating billions of people to prevent a disease with a 99% survival rate for people under 70 — all based on clinical trial efficacy analysis of less than 200 COVID-19 cases involving patients with coughs and unreliable PCR tests with significant false positive rates — is not the triumph of science. It’s corruption and it’s the tip of the iceberg.”

  65. drwilliams says:

    @Lynn
    see my post 20:48

  66. brad says:

    None of these people are sworn law enforcement. And certainly none of them are not in a position to make any laws.

    This is me, being naive, but… I don’t understand how *any* of the zillions of regulations issued by bureaucrats should have any meaning at all. The legislature should not be able to delegate its duties to unelected bureaucrats.

    – – – – –

    @drwilliams: The bit about the Dominion guy writing machine learning papers about emphasizing minority data sets: Toyotas have nothing to do with bananas. The topic is an important aspect of machine learning: how do you make your algorithm learn and care about edge cases, which you see relatively rarely? However, this has nothing whatsoever to do with vote tabulation. It’s a really desperate reach by people who don’t have a clue what they’re talking about. Source: machine learning was my PhD and a couple of post-docs.

  67. Nick Flandrey says:

    @brad, I’m missing something. I didn’t see anything about machine learning? only about doing a couple of sort operations on vote tallys and seeing some very strange numbers as a result, like integer ratios between vote numbers, which on their face seem to be unlikely in the sloppy real world.

    n

  68. brad says:

    @Nick: Maybe I mixed up links – I had a couple of tabs open, and one of them was an article where some Dominion employee had published an ML paper about emphasizing “minority” data. And the article’s author was using this as evidence that Dominion was boosting the votes for losing candidates. My bad…

  69. ech says:

    Vaccinating billions of people to prevent a disease with a 99% survival rate for people under 70

    The survival rate is not 99% for those under 70. Maybe under 45 or so. In addition, there are significant long-lasting health effects on a percentage (currently unknown but could be several percent) of people that get infected. They can last months to forever.

  70. SteveF says:

    The survival rate is not 99% for those under 70. Maybe under 45 or so.

    Speculation. An unknown but significant fraction of the US population “had” the disease but didn’t realize it. The commonly-used tests are so inaccurate that it’s unknown what fraction of the population actually had the Chinese Flu, nor how that fraction overlaps with the fraction who had symptoms.

    significant long-lasting health effects

    The claim of long-term cardio damage on “some fraction” of people who had Chinese Flu came from a debunked study. The claim of kidney (?) damage came from a different debunked study. Furthermore, a number of common diseases, including influenza, have long-term health effects on some small fraction of the people who contract them.

    SARS CoV2 is not the flu, because it comes from a different kind of cootie, but it’s a distinction without a difference. Medically, that is. Politically, it’s a tyrant’s dream come true thanks to a media and a soi disant health bureaucracy which supports tyranny.

Comments are closed.