Hot and humid. Rainy later. Just like yesterday. Yes, that is what yesterday was like. Sunny and hot, but then rain later. A downpour actually, in the late afternoon. There was about one inch of water in the buckets.
I had another day of low productivity. I felt better, but still had some lightheadedness so I wasn’t eager to work on hard stuff, plus it was hot as Hades outside. I did some cleanup before my wife got home, and I spent a couple of hours doing photos, measurements, and weight of stuff for ebay.
I also took the opportunity to concentrate on the puppy and help him succeed with his housebreaking… and had some good success. He is yipping when he wants to go out and pee. He gives a deeper bark when he wants out to poop. And I have started to figure out his timing. We didn’t have any accidents in the house today. First day! I caught him squatting after breakfast and shouted “no” and “outside” while throwing the door open, and out he went. Hooray! It helps that he’s very motivated by treats.
So that’s that. Little progress on some fronts, but good progress on another.
Today I’ll either continue with projects here at home, or get out and do some more work at my secondary. Maybe both. It will depend on how I feel. I don’t like being hostage to my body, I’m not used to letting it dictate to me, but I’m finding it more and more often of late. It’s trite, but I’m not in the shape I used to be in. I really need to spend the time and effort to try and get some of that back.
I think I also need to work a bit on getting rid of ‘monkey brain.’ I think that’s what one of my teachers called it. It’s when you jump from thing to thing, easily distracted. It keeps you from doing what you really need and want to do. Doing things because you can rather than should.
Gotta work on myself as well as the stacks.
Stackin’ won’t hurt though…
n
It is somewhat disturbing that I am getting emails about products to help with knees. Products to use after surgery. Products to use before surgery. Products to use to avoid surgery.
I am also getting ads on FB.
The only online site on which I mentioned the upcoming knee surgery is here. Which seems to indicate these comments are being scanned and somehow my email address is being located.
This information is being linked back to my FB account. I expect spam phone calls any day.
The cleverness and resources used by the spambots is amazing, annoying, and somewhat scary.
I wish that I had someone like Jaime Escalante to teach me Calculus in high school. I took trigonometry at Rice University between my junior and senior year in high school and was suppose to take Calculus my senior year. Instead, we moved out to Sugar Land and their high school requirements for Calculus included a class called Elementary Analysis which I had not taken. So I took that class and a computer class where I taught the other students Fortran by writing a chess game instead of Calculus. Big loss.
I then took my first Calculus course at TAMU in the summer in six weeks. Wow ! Throw me in the deep end and see if I drown. I made a B but did not get enough comprehension for the second Calculus course in the Fall.
My Calc grades were awful. My grades as an undergrad in general were awful. It was definitely a maturity issue since i pulled a 3.79 and 4.0, respectively, in my two grad programs over the last decade.
I didn’t make an ‘A’ in a math course until I reached the state university level. My community college math classes were tough, taught by a prof who was a personal friend of Louis Leithold and listed in the reviewer credits for the text. Diff Eq at the university level was like night and day, with the instructor at the big school essentially reading the exam questions the class meeting before tests in the hope of getting most of the 200 students to at least pass.
Maybe I didn’t appreciate the community college instruction quality, but I always believed that the Calculus prof went overboard on the exams, making every question geared towards an ‘A’ student.
I do know that the prof engendered a lot of bitterness in the local engineering student population. Well into the 2000s, it wasn’t uncommon to encounter a management type who had an axe to grind after being washed out of Dr. [name omitted] Calculus II at the community college. However, instead of sucking it up, putting on their big boy (or girl) pants, and trying again, they simply gave up.
Dr. [name omitted] retired about 15 years ago.
I never gave up, but my career has been a lot of sh*t shows. I don’t even encourage white males to study EE or CS anymore, however, since they’ll always be at a disadvantage to a “underrepresented” demographic, regardless of Calc grades.
The cleverness and resources used by the spambots is amazing, annoying, and somewhat scary.
A couple of years ago, I discussed “Dead Again” with a co-worker in the office, and within a few days, links to stories about the film started appearing in my Firefox default start page when I opened the browser at work.
I have tickets to see “Pulp Fiction” at Alamo next week, and my YouTube recommendations popped with this today. Not that I really mind. And, yes, Travolta is doing the “Batusi”, as confirmed by many interviews over the decades.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSLMN6g_Od4
“Forrest Gump”. Phtptph. People are still going to watch “Pulp Fiction” 50 years from now.
Another thought. MS Word has evolved since I went to Linux about six years ago. Some of the changes are even improvements. One thing I notice is that it is infinitely faster that LO Writer. I used to be able to outtype that… wonderful word processor. It also would interrupt my work with constant pesky dialogs. Word is a writer’s tool, although not the best I have used. However, all features considered, it is still good. Or, at least it has me trained. Not sure which.
One of the few practical bits of knowledge I picked up in grad school is that Word is not a serous writing tool once page counts exceed about 100 or so. And it isn’t just Microsoft — 30 years of GUIs, and text scrolling speeds haven’t improved much from early Mac and Windows 3.0.
I do have Amazon Alexa in the house and I discussed the knee surgery with my wife. Maybe Alexa listened in to the conversation without my knowledge. Amazon listen in to get an edge? Surely not.
I have also discussed the surgery with the VA and the doctor’s office on the phone. Maybe my phone line is tapped. I use xfinity for phone service and maybe Comcast/xfinity is monitoring my VOIP traffic for keywords without my knowledge.
I also sent a text message to a friend. Are text messages being monitored to be used for advertising spam?
The steps advertisers will take to gain an edge in my opinion teeters on the edge of illegal. Certainly irresponsible.
I also sent a text message to a friend. Are text messages being monitored to be used for advertising spam?
The carriers can do whatever they like with SMS messages since the data is technically part of a diagnostic process.
A warrant is definitely not required for law enforcement to get access. Typically, they simply ask the carrier, but if the carrier balks, a court order will suffice.
In your particular case, I’d suspect Alexa. You can try turning off her Wifi, but she’ll utilize your neighbor’s Internet connection if he has an Amazon wireless product.
Right now, we’re either seeing Peak Amazon or the early days of when they become “The Company Store” dominating our lives. I think it really depends on how fast energy costs rise over the next year and how serious the Progs get about antitrust to separate AWS and the retail operations.
I have done a 300+ page document in MSWord without any real issues. Table of Contents, index at the end, multiple headers and sections. It all just worked.
The trick in MSWord is tell the program what you want, let the MSWord do the dirty work. Don’t use spaces to align and instead use tabs, use tabs to draw lines rather than multiple underscores, don’t use multiple line breaks for spacing and instead use paragraph spacing, use headings and footers, use heading styles for easy indexing, line breaks at the end of a paragraph only, use page breaks instead of paragraph breaks to get a new page, etc. Basically don’t even remotely consider MSWord a replacement for a typewriter, which a lot of people that grew up with typewriters continue to operate.
I had people with documents where they used return at the end of each line, two returns at the end of a paragraph. When I encountered those documents I would change the margins narrowing each side by 1/8 of an inch. Or change the font size from 10 points to 11 points and watch the horror of the reformatting. It was amusing watching the person that created the document try to fix all the broken lines. When they used returns to get to a new page I would change the paragraph formatting by increased by 1 point messing up the page breaks. Yeh, I was a jerk, but it was amusing.
The funniest prank I played on people involved an elevator at HQ Air Force Military Personnel Center. There were three flours plus a basement, thus four buttons on the elevator panel. Normal order was “B” at the bottom then “1”, “2” and “3” at the top. What most people would consider normal and logically correct.
One Saturday while in the building waiting on a test I removed the cover of the elevator control panel. I discovered the buttons where nothing but caps over the actual switch. I removed the caps from the switches and replaced them in the wrong order. “B” was now at the top and “3” was at the bottom. I replaced the panel.
Monday was a circle jerk with people using the elevator. They would push “3” and go to the basement. They would push “2” and go to the first floor. Those going to the basement wound on the third floor. Many just abandoned the elevator and used the stairs after three or four attempts to get to the floor they desired. It was hilarious.
The buttons stayed the way for two days. I don’t know if anyone called maintenance because no one fixed the problem. I put the caps back on the correct switches late Tuesday night.
Basically don’t even remotely consider MSWord a replacement for a typewriter, which a lot of people that grew up with typewriters continue to operate.
My mother uses word processors that way. In the 80s, she destroyed the print head of our household’s dot matrix printer running off her 200 page thesis to correct the formatting errors every time she did revisions. I lost track of how many $12 ribbons she burned through.
I keep a copy of Word 2003 around just for my resume, having let the program do all the formatting work. If I make adjustments to the Word 6.0 DOC file in later versions of Office, the spaghetti C code that is Microsoft’s legacy import library never gets the formatting right. LibreOffice/OpenOffice are worse.
I let the programs do the formatting work, but scrolling in Windows to edit documents makes me nuts. I suspect fixing scrolling speed is one of the reasons they are going to require DirectX 12 graphics cards for Windows 11. Scrolling speed and fighting the platform being used for video piracy by the torrent crowd targeting Netflix, Disney+, and whatever Paramount calls their service these days.
BTW, another takeaway from grad school was to put together PowerPoint in LibreOffice equivalent and then export. The LO default formatting is much cleaner. I’m not a big slide person, maybe 10 for a half hour talk, mostly URLs or other citations.
@Ray Thompson
Ever read Westlake’s “Help I Am Being Held Prisoner”?
No.
I have a copy of Office 2003 with a static activation key. They key will activate without ever phoning home. The software can be activated as many times as you desire. If you need a copy, along with the key, let me know and I can bundle up a file and get it to you.
And the truth be known, for 99.89% of the population MS Office 2003 is probably more than they need to do their documents. The newer versions added some oddball features and collaboration which the majority of the home users do not need.
I have a copy of Office 2003 with a static activation key. They key will activate without ever phoning home. The software can be activated as many times as you desire. If you need a copy, along with the key, let me know and I can bundle up a file and get it to you.
Thanks for the offer, but I have the Death Star’s activation key as well as an old static install disc with key from the university, found during a cabinet clean out/junk trashing near the end of my employment. I didn’t know Office 2003 ever phoned home as part of the install.
I don’t see myself continuing to do the cr*ppy tech jobs career covered by the resume beyond the point where my daughter graduates from high school in 2024. At that point, we’ll have to make some decisions about if and where to relocate so my wife can bank some decent money for about a decade before we look at retirement while we are still physically able to get out and see some things.
If we’re near a Buc-ee’s, I’ll be scrubbing the toilets by day and working on our finances at night.
Tech hubs are a terrible place to try and make money in medicine. Even the biggest tech companies are tight fisted when it comes to benefits. In Austin, the VA pays light years better than private practice, and my wife isn’t under constant pressure to violate Texas DEA prescribing Adderall to the faux ADD junkies.
@ray:
IMO, this has been true since Word 6. And don’t get me started on the verdammt ribbon. Which I think is a attempt to lock out Open|Libre Office.
That said, the default option in Word 2003 to hide less-used menu options was another mistake, which the ribbon made worse.
G.
I’ve found this to be true of most older versions of Office. Probably not Office 365, but definitely Office XP, Office 2003 and Office 2007 (I haven’t tried it with 2010, 2013, 2016, or 2019 as I’ve just never needed to). Basically, install it, you get an activation nastygram. Call the 800#. Tell them you got a new motherboard or new CPU or whatever. They say “Okay! Your activation code is xxxxxxxx.” I think there’s this assumption that if you have the audacity to call that you must be legit and there’s very little interrogation or investigation involved. I think I activated the exact same copy of Office 2003 Pro like 100 times on at least 20 different PCs. Every time I called and every time they gave me the activation code with no hassle at all.
The only online site on which I mentioned the upcoming knee surgery is here.
–Hey Ray, it’s been pretty well established that if you talk about it out loud, near a cell phone linked to you, you will start getting the ads. You probably had your phone with you at the dr office, or whatever snooper app is running heard you talk about it over the phone (not listening to the actual phone call, as that would involve wiretap rules, but listening to what comes out of the speaker and your mouth.)
Visio TVs that are internet connected also listen for keywords, they’ve acknowledged that in their quarterly or annual stock reports. Others likely do as well.
n
On Calculus: I did great in II and III at a Community College. I took a year off before going to Uni and took III. That was rough. I didn’t take DiffEQ since it wasn’t required for Math majors.
My kids are always asking me to text them the Netflix/Amazon/XXX logins. I told them a couple of months ago to get Signal since I wouldn’t do it in Messages again. Grumble, Grumble, @^$$@$%^ Father.
We are also looking at getting out of business next year. We’ll both be on SS and milspec pension. We can live decently. Why bust our asses.
Keep it classy ladies….
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9802631/Wild-brawl-breaks-dozen-teenage-girls-outside-Shake-Shack-Detroit.html
n
Amish alert! Amish alert! Those darn Amish.
Visio TVs that are internet connected also listen for keywords, they’ve acknowledged that in their quarterly or annual stock reports. Others likely do as well.
Most doctors/dentist office waiting areas I’ve encountered over the last decade have a smart TV running HGTV.
During the end of my time at the Death Star, my otherwise useless lead picked up another patent for locating a phone in a building based on which audio feed from specific TV channels. Considering what the company spent to get the IP protected, I’m sure the patent has seen use.
Keep it classy ladies….
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9802631/Wild-brawl-breaks-dozen-teenage-girls-outside-Shake-Shack-Detroit.html
Amish … and Shake Shack, the traditional, thrifty but filling cuisine favored by the local residents which fuels the barn raising and spring planting events.
My kids are always asking me to text them the Netflix/Amazon/XXX logins. I told them a couple of months ago to get Signal since I wouldn’t do it in Messages again. Grumble, Grumble, @^$$@$%^ Father.
You might actually have some expectation of privacy in Messenger, but I’ll admit that I’ve never read the EULA.
a smart TV running HGTV.
-yup, kid1’s orthodontist. Could be that the demographic in the waiting room is likely to find the channel interesting. And can we please get aspect ratio set correctly?
The doc in the box near me was playing MeTV, Adam 12. Kid was fascinated. NO idea why. Apparently shot on film since it looked great.
n
The vacant neighbor’s house is getting a new roof today. Either he sold it and the new owner is fixing the roof, or he is replacing the roof with a hail claim before the new owner buys it.
Wonder which? The hail claim makes more sense, but my wife pointed out that he may have just given the buyer a deduct for a new roof to be rid of the place. Doesn’t really need a roof, the roof is only 10yr old.
n
My new plugin, which has been running for at least a year, analyzes all comments and reports them to an online advertising company. Specific keywords are monitored.
For this information, I get a monthly payment that provides me with additional funding for various other ‘monitoring’ devices, including the access to the home cameras of all participants here. The cameras belonging to someone called “Nick” is especially useful, and includes an automatic download of his geolocation for his daily travels. This information is also sold to that advertising agency.
I am not allowed, based on my contract (which is verbal only), to disclose the name of the company. But they have large data centers in many areas to process the information from this site, as well as many others.
I use the income to pay for my extreme Jelly Belly addiction. And to fund my own company that has a service that deactivates any tracking ‘bugs’ that are in vaccines. That particular product has been in high demand over the past year, as there is high demand for the inactivation of tracking microcells. This has been a highly lucrative product for my company.
I hesitate to disclose this information, but the software I use to report on comments here automatically ignores any comments I add to this site. In fact, anyone reading this comment will assume that it is not true. Which is done by the hidden codes inside the content of this site.
My evil plan is safe and secure.
Genius!
n
The doc in the box near me was playing MeTV, Adam 12. Kid was fascinated. NO idea why. Apparently shot on film since it looked great.
The landmark Mark VII Limited series received new digital transfers for DVD at some point in the last decade. Jack Webb had them filmed because, like Lucy, he understood the value of reruns.
The Webb family floats “Emergency” and “Dragnet” to Weigel channels (MeTV, H&I) as well as AntennaTV periodically. “Adam 12” is also rotated round, but Universal owns the series outright so the contracts are different.
The 50th anniversary of “Emergency” is next year. It is airing on AntennaTV currently IIRC, but I imagine MeTV will pick it up again once the publicity machine starts up.
Seeing the restored vehicles from “Emergency” at the LA County Fire Museum is on my list of West Coast things to do in the near future. Everything you see used by the actors on the reruns is real with the possible exception of the paramedic truck, built to county spec by Universal.
Prior to “Emergency” the number of paramedic units in this country was extremely limited to the point that even the vehicles were uncommon. Universal put their prop department to work when they couldn’t get a real truck, but the upside was better ability to mount cameras than the crew could with the *real* Ward LeFrance fire engine.
There are much worse things your kids could watch than “Adam 12”. Mark VII strived for realism with the cases but they weren’t “NYPD Blue”. The fire stations at both Universal Studios sites in the US are still “Company 51”, and, after the series ended, the fire engine was lovingly cared for serving in Yosemite National Park until a few years ago.
There has been an upsurge in discussion of caches online in the last few days.
I’ve never seen much point in it when it comes to burying stuff. I’ve given it thought, but wth can you dig a hole deep enough for a rifle without anyone noticing?
Maybe it’s because of how bad things have to be before a cache is useful that keeps me from actually doing it, but you essentially have to be on the run, with no access to normal channels, for a cache (in the sense of buried resources) to be useful. Things are dire indeed at that point, and what is your goal?
I have established caches of a sort, in the form of food and some basic gear stored in places I’m likely to be. My mom has one. My sibling in Michigan has one. I’ve got a secondary location here in town.
It’s an interesting exercise to think of what you would bury, but more interesting to me is “what is your goal with that stuff?”
n
“What is your goal” should define what goes into the cache.
Simple survival? Urban or wilderness? For how long? Are you an insurgent? Combatant?
Terrorist? I mean ‘freedom fighter’?What would it look like if you want to stay alive in the woods for a couple of days? Again though, to what end? Wolverines coming to bring you in? Resupply to take a couple more with you before you get captured? Under what conditions are you going to be digging up a rifle/handgun and ammo in the woods?
Are you just hiding stuff from someone trying to confiscate it? If they know you have it you better be able to show where it went convincingly if you don’t have it anymore or they’ll just keep raping your daughter until you tell them.
If you’ve given it some thought, I’m open to being convinced.
In the mean time, I’m thinking of what would fit in a paint bucket out in the garage….
n
A few reasons. First, they can still infect you and people that can’t get vaccinated. That keeps the virus around longer. Second, and more importantly, it means there is a reservoir of people where mutations can develop. Delta came out of India, IIRC. The US and EU need to figure out what additional roadblocks there are to ramping up vaccine production and continue the Warp Speed approach to building up the supply.
Once we get enough people vaccinated/immune we also need to consider strong quarantine measures on people coming from places where it is still endemic. Given how fast Delta grows, a test the day before entry probably isn’t good enough.
I’m hearing a lot about how delta spreads more readily but nothing about it’s outcomes.
What is its R(0) vs other variants?
Is is more or less deadly? If MORE then why? We’ve been told that over time deadliness should decrease. Also told that contagiousness should decrease. (And that hot would cause it to decrease. And that cold would cause it to decrease.) Isn’t it in a virus’ nature to eventually spread easily but have less deleterious effect on the hosts?
So the question is, is our understanding of how virii work that flawed? Is this not behaving like other virii? And if not then WHY? Or were all those things lies?
n
There has been an upsurge in discussion of caches online in the last few days.
I’ve never seen much point in it when it comes to burying stuff. I’ve given it thought, but wth can you dig a hole deep enough for a rifle without anyone noticing?
Congress never lifted Roosevelt’s gold confiscation order with a law protecting private ownership of negotiable forms (coins, bullion). Ford simply vacated one EO with another.
When Roosevelt confiscated negotiable gold, the banks drilled the safe deposit boxes, but the Feds could not muster the manpower to go door-to-door. That situation has changed, and negotiable silver will be on the table next time. Plus the pandemic has energized the Karens, which didn’t exist in such large quantities in 1933.
Once we get enough people vaccinated/immune we also need to consider strong quarantine measures on people coming from places where it is still endemic. Given how fast Delta grows, a test the day before entry probably isn’t good enough.
The large companies in this country will never go along with enforcement of a real quarantine that prevents Subcontinent from coming and going as they please. Plus, there is political advantage for Dems if Diwali (sp?) this year is the mother of all superspreader events, the waves reaching the US during primary season for 2022 next Spring.
It is a fantasy to expect that culture, steeped in lying, will honor a voluntary quarantine. All of my wife’s near-miss infection situations at the VA came courtesy of Subcontinent providers knowingly going to work and hiding symptoms to avoid spending their sick leave.
Delta is more contagious, that much is known. the exact R(0) going to be hard to figure out given the high number of asymptomatic cases and the vaccination rate. We might be able to figure it out from the spread in India, where, IIRC, it came from.
The experience in Israel and the UK points to it not being more deadly. That’s not against the grain in virus evolution, but is in line with things like colds – some of which are coronaviruses. I don’t think our understanding is flawed. What is happening is that with fast international travel, we’ve got a faster version of the 1919 flu epidemic going on world wide. So, a lot of past experience with viruses is less relevant.
A few reasons. First, they can still infect you and people that can’t get vaccinated. That keeps the virus around longer. Second, and more importantly, it means there is a reservoir of people where mutations can develop. Delta came out of India, IIRC. The US and EU need to figure out what additional roadblocks there are to ramping up vaccine production and continue the Warp Speed approach to building up the supply.
So what are you suggesting the government does regarding those who refuse vaccination?
Vaccine supply in the US is not a problem. Maybe in the EU, but that is more of a political problem than technical.
A Modest Proposal 😀
When tRump tried this, he was called a racist. Our goobermint politi-turds have flip-flopped so much, nobody believes them. I’m all for quarantine/preventing foreigners from coming until we are vaxed up. Will plugs have the balls to do it?
Here’s an idea: cut a bunch of L shapes to look roughly like guns and glue them to the palms of urban oxygen thieves. I’m sure this is a bad idea and I should feel bad for thinking it, but it’s also a funny idea and I feel pretty good for thinking it.
Ya know, anything you are likely to build into a cache would make a nice little kit.
Maybe we could call it the 5 gallon bucket challenge….
You come home from a meeting and .gov is tossing your house. You turn around and leave before you’re seen. What would you want in a 5 gallon bucket for the next 3 days until you can get your lawyer to answer the phone?
n
Got the grass cut. Boy howdy it’s hot. 103 F in the sun. The whole front yard is in shade and there is a mild breeze, but I was soaked thru in 10 minutes.
I decided to do it before we got rain again.
And I just got my school district “sign up as a volunteer” email for the coming school year. FTW we’ll be back in session and mostly back to normal.
nn
Another thought. MS Word has evolved since I went to Linux about six years ago. Some of the changes are even improvements. One thing I notice is that it is infinitely faster that LO Writer. I used to be able to outtype that… wonderful word processor. It also would interrupt my work with constant pesky dialogs. Word is a writer’s tool, although not the best I have used. However, all features considered, it is still good. Or, at least it has me trained. Not sure which.
One of the few practical bits of knowledge I picked up in grad school is that Word is not a serous writing tool once page counts exceed about 100 or so. And it isn’t just Microsoft — 30 years of GUIs, and text scrolling speeds haven’t improved much from early Mac and Windows 3.0.
We use Word for our software user manuals. It is “good enough” (TM to JEP) for that purpose and they are 300 to 500 pages long.
https://www.winsim.com/doco.html
Jebus. The hyperbole and florid writing makes me want to puke on my keyboard.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9803525/Florida-man-38-carried-Trump-2020-flag-stormed-Capitol-given-eight-months-prison.html
–so how long did those democrats who actually set off an explosion get?
and since actual domestic terrorists and bombers are now on the faculty of universities, I find it very hard to believe that a guy wandering around with a flag is the end of democracy.
n
I have tickets to see “Pulp Fiction” at Alamo next week, and my YouTube recommendations popped with this today. Not that I really mind. And, yes, Travolta is doing the “Batusi”, as confirmed by many interviews over the decades.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSLMN6g_Od4
“Forrest Gump”. Phtptph. People are still going to watch “Pulp Fiction” 50 years from now.
I’ve never seen “Pulp Fiction” all the way through. I get to the scene where they are torturing the guy and yuck out.
–let me rephrase that… “we have acted as censors over 18M times and shadowbanned 167M posts” yet we repeated and amplified the official government statements that were later reveal to be outright lies or carefully crafted statements intended to deceive.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9803603/Biden-does-u-turn-insists-Facebook-ISNT-killing-people-attacking-Mark-Zuckerberg.html
–I guess we know who is the master and who is the boot licker now.
n
“who really rules? Who can’t you criticize.”
Not much. The recent polling shows that a lot of the remaining unvaccinated are simply wait and see people that have become sort of apathetic about making the effort. I think some PSAs from prominent celebrities would help, if targeted right. (That prima donna LeBron James could have done the cause a lot of good by doing a “I’m vaccinated, you should be too” campaign in concert with his new film. But it appears he’s refused to get vaccinated.) Also, getting a final approval for the vaccines would take away the “it’s not fully approved” argument. That should happen soon. They could also do a campaign of “Do you want schools open? Get vaccinated! Get your teens vaccinated!”
I also think some mea culpas from Fauci and others would help.
It’s a problem in Central America, South America, Asia, Africa, Canada, Australia. That’s who we need to help next.
And this is the kind of mendacious BS that is driving the mistrust.
—this isn’t even news. It’s a novel virus. Eventually everyone will get it if they are not naturally immune (of 7B people, there must be someone) or they have an effective vaccine. This was stated baldly last March.
—-“could be” or it “could NOT be” especially given that in his own words another unknown percentage have had COVID-19 that was so mild they didn’t bother to get tested.
—-everyone will get some variant, see above, and EVERYONE including vaccinated people is “at risk” of being hospitalized, see the news from Israel and the UK.
–his numbers don’t even match official numbers, so did he just pull round numbers out of *thin air*?
—while completely missing the implication of his statement that “another 25% have had COVID-19” is likely undercounted for the EXACT SAME REASON.
n
I’ve never seen “Pulp Fiction” all the way through. I get to the scene where they are torturing the guy and yuck out.
The last reel of the flick, starting with the chapter titled “The Bonnie Situation” is one of the most sublime pieces of film in existence. Legend is that Robert Rodriguez handled the directing chores since Quentin Tarantino appears in the scenes as “Jimmy”.
Essentially, the section of the film from the first moments Harvey Keitel appears until they wrap the “situation” at the junk yard with Julia Sweeney’s Raquel. The chapter is my argument as to why the film deserved Best Picture honors over “Forrest Gump”.
“Gump” will be forgotten in a decade.
There are people that think a Constitutional Convention is a good idea. F NO! Not with “corn teen” geniuses out there.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9802645/AT-T-releases-misspelled-words-state-year.html
n
“IPv6 still 5–10 years away from mainstream use, but K8s networking and multi-cloud are now real”
https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/15/ipv6_istilli_510_years_away/
“IPv6 is still five to ten years away from ascending to analyst firm Gartner’s plateau of productivity, and remains a technology employed by only “early mainstream” users.
So says the firm’s 2021 Hype Cycle for Enterprise Networking, published last week and now grasped in The Register’s claws.”
I ain’t holding my breath.
Here’s an idea for a PSA regarding the Chinese Crud injections, designed to address vaccine hesitancy:
When I say “address vaccine hesitancy”, of course I mean “increase vaccine hesitancy”.
“and it could be the most ‘serious virus of their lifetimes’ as US sees cases rise by 210% in three weeks”
—-“could be” or it “could NOT be” especially given that in his own words another unknown percentage have had COVID-19 that was so mild they didn’t bother to get tested.
Cases will rise in the near term for the next week at a minimum. As I previously stated, I saw *huge* parties in restaurants from Corpus Christi south along the Texas coast the week after the 4th, and no one had masks. I imagine the FOMO repeated all over the country.
The death counts are still extremely low, however.
I ain’t holding my breath.
Not without a NAT solution in consumer routers.
I’m tired of hearing that NAT isn’t necessary with IPv6.
Like every Kindle and TV in the world need to be directly on the web? I doubt that. Do Kindles even do IPv6?
My wISP is offering IPv6. I think it’s free. I have it disabled in my router and on the few PCs here. My thinking is that I’ll turn it on when I can’t get to websites I like to read.
And yes, a router. Always. If for noting more than to absorb the constant hammering from spammers.
Weather Liars say rain. So far it’s circling around. I was going to mow at least the paths but I felt a few sprinkles. Maybe tomorrow.
Buddy the Beagle is getting the house training stuff sorted out. He’s learned to come bother me when he needs out. I’ve learned that he needs a walk in the morning, like at sunrise, for dropping off processed food. So we do that. I make my coffee, put it on the desk and out we go. We have a pee and eat cat food walk around 10AM. Maybe another dribble walk around 2PM. Snack at 4PM. Supper at 5ish. After supper I have at most ten minutes to get him out for a walk.
Another walk before bed time. Yeah, I miss the last 10 of StarTrek but it beats having to go for a walk at 2AM.
Penny is “open the door” and she does her thing.
Buddy is a nose on four legs and needs a leash.
Why are Floridians searching for pharaoh? Inquiring minds want to know!
RickH kindly sent my me his new, used phone but AT&T has resorted to outright lies and sleazy tactics trying to get me to buy one of their phones. After three days and 4+ hours on hold while they appreciated my patience I finally got the old, cracked Moto X up and running. Guess who’s switching carriers when my billing cycle ends? AT&T can osculate my fundament.
Just got an email from the ‘Zon that is kinda confusing…
Moving away from arbitration?? Gotta be a catch.
“The coronavirus vaccines were developed under President Donald Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed”. Without President Trump, the vaccines would have taken much longer to develop. ”
The Progs killed millions of people with their anti-Donald-Trump-virus rhetoric, their anti-Donald-Trump reaction to any suggestion that an common inexpensive drug could be part of the treatment, their embrace of suppression measures (lockdowns, masks) that had no basis in science, and their total ineptitude when passed the ball on January 20.
Now the most unvaccinated groups in the U.S. are black and hispanic, coincidentally the most ignorant after years of Prog control of education, and staunch yellow dog Democrats.
The best method for changing their minds about being vaccinated would be to have K’mala use her principle talent and pull a train around the inner cities and hand out doobies to everyone who gets the shot.
Of course, they could always man up, admit they were wrong, embrace conventional drug therapies to save lives based on the science, send the vaccines through non-emergency testing…
and give nominating speeches for Donald Trump’s Nobel Peace Prize.
Moving away from arbitration?? Gotta be a catch.
Eliminating chargebacks through the credit card company?
Less claims and workload? People are intimidated by courts and it may be expensive…
Home from my trip this afternoon and I notice the roofer next door. Something doesn’t look right. So I watch. He’s only nailing the half of the shingle he can easily reach. He’s leaving literally half of each shingle un-nailed.
Then he puts new drip edge over the old. They put the new tar paper over the old. they re-used the metal flashing in the valleys.
Wife notes that they didn’t pull an HOA permit. Calls it in. I remember seeing them take shingles OFF the roof when I was leaving the house… check video, yup. Took the shingle bundles that were on the roof, loaded them into a trailer, and left.
SO I go look in the driveway and dumpster. They have 3 kinds of bundles stacked. and they’re putting at least two of them on the roof. I don’t think ANY of them are on the approved by the HOA list. One is listed as “economical” in every other sentence on the manf web site and our HOA doesn’t do “economical.”
I think they’re using cheaper shingles on the back of the house. REALLY cheap shingles on the garage (supposed to be same as house), and they MIGHT use the others on the front. OR they just stacked the best grade in the driveway where people can see it, while actually putting up the cheap ones.
And I think they either stole the original bundles off the roof, or they were only ever for show.
So really poor workmanship. Reuse of materials. using more than one shingle in violation of the HOA rules. Possible that none of the shingles are approved, and working w/out permit. Of course no safety gear. Possible stealing materials.
Oh joy.
And I’ve got pix and video.
‘n
“Borders of Infinity (7) (Vorkosigan Saga)” by Lois McMaster Bujold
https://www.amazon.com/Borders-Infinity-Vorkosigan-McMaster-Bujold/dp/1476781931/?tag=ttgnet-20
Book number nine (in chronological order) of a sixteen book space opera series. However, some people call this a military science fiction series. There are several other books and short stories in the Vorkosigan Universe. This series won the Hugo and Nebula awards for best series in 2017. Also, several of the individual books in the series have either won awards or been nominated for awards. I have read this book at least twice. I reread the well printed and well bound used trade paperback published by Baen in 1986 that I just rebought on Amazon. I have rebought the rest of the books in the series in various formats, mostly MMPB.
This book is collection of three novellas with short stories gluing them together. The first novella is the Hugo winning “The Mountains Of Mourning”. The second novella is the awesome story “Labyrinth” about Miles meeting the extreme genetically manipulated human. And the third novella is “The Borders of Infinity” about Miles in a Cetagandan prison camp.
Vorkosigan Saga (Chronological) by Lois McMaster Bujold
https://www.goodreads.com/series/98254-vorkosigan-saga-chronological
My rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars (276 reviews)
So really poor workmanship. Reuse of materials. using more than one shingle in violation of the HOA rules. Possible that none of the shingles are approved, and working w/out permit. Of course no safety gear. Possible stealing materials.
The owners should have a permit with contact information on file with the city/county. If the information isn’t online — “Florida Man” would have it up already — you should be able to get the relevant info by phone.
No permit from the city or the HOA. Installed shingles are not on the ‘pre-approved’ list and you def can’t mix them. Only architectural shingles are allowed in any case and one of the styles is a simple three tab.
sent a text to the kid who owned it, says he’s sold the house but is paying for the roof. Said to send him a list of what I thought was wrong… so I did.
He’s the seller, so he might have been driving all the cost cutting, but having just put $40k of roof on my house, I’m not inclined to let anyone slide. Since he’s not around, I suspect he’s just being taken advantage of by the low cost guy.
n
Huh, I got the amazon terms change notice too.
n
I think another company, Patreon?, got burned by having to individually arbitrate many many cases.
They then tried to retroactively change the contract to a group, (class action?), lawsuit, but the judge wasn’t having any of that.
I’m guessing Amazon was paying attention (and perhaps sees something big coming?).
Huh, I got the amazon terms change notice too.
n
Looks like Big River sent out two hundred million email notices today. Maybe three hundred million.
I got two notices today. One to my business email account and one to my personal email account.
wow, how does something like that not get automatically flagged as spam?
n