Why yes, on this cold winter’s night I am easily amused. And it was cold, 33F at 1:30am. Don’t know what today will bring, but I’m gonna go out on a limb and say “cold and damp, with clear sky”.
Did some indoor stuff yesterday morning, and early afternoon. I was watching an auction for household stuff including a desk for D2 to go under her new lofted bed. Won it, and some other stuff. I was alternating that with stripping stuff off the family All In One PC, preparatory to either selling it or repurposing it as my “radio” pc. Not sure yet what I’ll do but I have to get it depersonalized and ready to sell, so I can get it out of the house. Didn’t get much else done. Did test some audio gear for resale, so there is that.
Today should be occupied with pickups and cleanup. Unless I drive 2 hours north to look at a property one of our friends clued us into last night. Sounds nice and it’s on the lake we want to be on. In fact it’s near our friend’s lake house. Nice to have friends… It’s not the rural retreat that first one we looked at was, but it’s better than most and near people we know, and on a good sized lot. Given the way inflation has been going, I would like to get some cash turned into real estate. The asking price seems pretty good too.
We’ll see how quickly we need to jump.
If this is the one, I’ll have a whole new place to stack stuff…..
Stack some of your own!
n
Windows 10? Just wipe the disk with zeros, install clean and let the buyer worry about drivers for all of the nitty gritty.
The license is locked to the hardware. Intel supposedly isn't putting serial numbers on the CPUs, but I imagine the chipsets have something.
@Lynn
Some years ago there was a lawsuit concerning the inequity of bathrooms at sports facilities. Simple parity in fixtures when one group takes longer inevitably produces longer lines for the females (as traditionally defined).
Packers host the Niners at Lambeau tonight. Too bad I quit watching woke football, and too bad Lombardi isn't there to turn the temp down a bit more.
Oh, but wait! Maybe all's not so woke after all:
https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/33088151/the-unfiltered-year-aaron-rodgers
Not the shitty remake, I hope.
The NFL beat reporters want Rodgers to lose tonight so they don't have to consider him for league MVP again.
They don't really want to give it to Brady either, but he's fully vaxxed.
My wife is out of it today since she had to have a booster for a school trip to NYC.
I'm still waiting for the knock on my door …
Crenshaw went completely down the rabbit hole:
AMERICA WOULD NOT BE HERE WITHOUT ISRAEL
Red pilled, blue pilled, is there a green pill he can take?
I took the bait. Used my credit card so if it does not work out I can get the CC company to fight it out and give me my money back. Yes, a risk. But I am willing to gamble with my unexpected VA bonus money. Well, taxpayers' money allocated to me. If the VA is going to give the money, I would be an idiot to not take the money. To me it is like beating the IRS at their game and taking advantage of every single possible tax loophole.
My understanding is that the "key" is actually some sort of hash created by Microsoft based on the hardware in the machine. Number and size of disk drives, amount of memory, etc. Change one thing and the license is still good. Change too many things and the license borks.
That has actually happened to me when I increased the memory and added a SSD hard drive. Windows said the machine was no longer licensed. I called and was given an activation key once I explained the changes I had made. That was many moons ago so maybe that has changed.
Stacksocial says the keys are immediately available. That was 30 minutes ago and still no keys have been generated. Maybe because it is a weekend or maybe I got snookered. I will give it time. I did do some research on the web before purchasing and the site has positive reviews.
Thank the Chinese.
Not the shitty remake, I hope.
— did not know there was s remake. No No, and more NO. Emilio Estevez (Shut up Archie, you’re nothing but a white suburban punk), Harry Dean Stanton (Ordinary F’in people, I hate ’em.) and the soundtrack of the punk/ska gods.
The tv edit is just barely passable in it’s awfulness, but this is why I collect original media.
Speaking of which, I found a copy of original Bad News Bears and the sequel in the bins this week. Haven’t ripped them yet, but they were a ‘find it in the bins’ grail.
—
32F at 2 am, but 41F at the moment and warming.
n
Doesn't Rand McNally accept ads?
Most of the source information is freely available and, purchased on the scale of Rand McNally, printing on paper is still fairly cheap in this country.
printing on paper is still fairly cheap in this country.
— "fairly" vs "really" is a big gap. Almost no one volume prints in the US. Just dealing with the waste used to be a big issue. If Gannet can't run it on their presses, I'm guessing it goes to chine.
(Or whoever owns the USA Today printer in the big cities.)
n
“Speaking of which, I found a copy of original Bad News Bears and the sequel in the bins this week. Haven’t ripped them yet, but they were a ‘find it in the bins’ grail.”
If you’re going to go Matthau, look for a copy of “Hopscotch”.
Sadly it is rated ‘R’.
The “Dune” movie is out on DVD if you run PG-13 for the kids. My only complaint about it is that Part Two was not already being filmed when Part One hit theaters.
“Aquaman” as Duncan Idaho rules. I lost count how many Sardukar he took out when that door closed, but if they were true to the books, it is 19, killing several while … let’s say he’s gravely wounded.
“Dune” is as non-woke as the director could get away with being.
I've long believed that Cramer needed to be in prison 20 years ago, but shilling Netflix as it burned off the last support for its pandemic price should earn him a spot in the first group lined up against the wall when the revolution comes.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2022-01-21/jims-unlucky-number
Overnight in NYFC…
"Domestic Disturbance" call, always dangerous, ended tragically.
Perp was wounded and in surgery (why?) He was armed with a Glock fitted with a drum magazine.
https://nypost.com/2022/01/21/nypd-cops-shot-in-harlem/
Stolen from Maryland.
I got my Office 2021 activation keys. Well, one of them by copying from the website. Supposed to be emails with the details coming within 24 hours. The code that I have worked. There are some issues for me.
First is that the default download is 64 bit. The 32 bit version needs to be explicitly selected for download.
Second is that it requires removal of previous office versions which was not really a surprise. So I had to uninstall Office 2016 and Visio 2016.
Third is that Visio 2016 is not compatible with Office 2021. That may have been a 64/32 bit issue as my copy of Visio is 32 bit.
Fourth issue, and this is typical Microsoft, everything on the menus was moved around.
This is not an issue with the keys. Microsoft now validates the key before the software can be downloaded. Even then all that is downloaded is a small installer file that downloads the rest of the files needed for the install.
Yes, the site works, Office 2021 Professional for $49 + tax. It also requires a Microsoft account where Microsoft stores the information about the purchase. Not the actual amount, but that the key has been used and it belongs to the account. I suspect that one copy can be installed on two computers as that is fairly common.
Decide with caution. For me I am going back to Office 2016 and Visio 2016. There is nothing in Office 2021 that I need or will ever use.
If you’re going to go Matthau, look for a copy of “A New Leaf”.
Warmed up a bit. 61F in the sun.
Won some gub items in today's auction. Now to get out of the house. Soon-ish.
Lake property is two lots, one house, 80s time capsule decor wise, 80 yo parents both died in the same month, kids have their own houses. Sellers are motivated. Going to see it on Monday if she can meet me there.
n
Decide with caution. For me I am going back to Office 2016 and Visio 2016. There is nothing in Office 2021 that I need or will ever use.
— very few of us need more than 10% of any of those. I just fired up excel for some invoicing, visio to document my customer's install and sketchup to model my house for the discussion about any reno work…
sketchup is 2014
visio is 2007
and so is the rest of the office suite. Perfectly adequate without all the online nonsense. I only have office because this was my work machine for my business.
I did use ppt for the volunteer stuff I did, but anything would have worked.
oh yeah, and all running on win8.2 with classic start menu
n
If the parents were in an ACLF last February, look carefully for signs of water damage.
We seriously looked at one house to the point that we were ready to put in a bid when the sellers realtor fessed up to burst pipes and hidden damage in the previous once-per-decade freeze event in Texas, after the parents went into an ACLF that winter. The house had been a rental with a couple of tennants for a few years after that.
Disclosure may have prevented a problem, but after a long period as a rental, the sellers could have always blamed dishonest tennants.
Our rental around the corner had lots of problems which the landlored always seemed surprised about when I brought them to his attention.
“Really? Oh, that’s not something that has come up before.”
“Go look at my 200 photo timestamped documentation of the condition of the house at move in in Google Photos. This [problem of the month] is in there.”
After we moved out, I understand the breakfast nook developed mold from a leaky roof.
At this point, I can do a better inspection than most home inspectors… usually just from the photos.
If I can walk in, my nose and allergies will tell me 98% of what I need to know. But I think both parents were in the house until they recently got sick.
What I don't know anything about is marine stuff, and wells, and septic. I think I'll get help for those. and my buddy has been the neighbor for 40+ years.
n
I got my Office 2021 activation keys. Well, one of them by copying from the website. Supposed to be emails with the details coming within 24 hours. The code that I have worked. There are some issues for me.
First is that the default download is 64 bit. The 32 bit version needs to be explicitly selected for download.
Second is that it requires removal of previous office versions which was not really a surprise. So I had to uninstall Office 2016 and Visio 2016.
Third is that Visio 2016 is not compatible with Office 2021. That may have been a 64/32 bit issue as my copy of Visio is 32 bit.
The transition from 32 bit to 64 bit for MS Office is going to be horrible for software suppliers like us. The transition from 16 bit to 32 bit for MS Office was easy since MS supplied 16 to 32 bit thunking tools. There are no such thunking tools for 32 bit to 64 bit that I know of.
I am porting all of our software to 64 bit starting with our calculation engine. It is rough going since I am having to move to a new compiler to start with. So I am porting to the 32 bit version of the compiler first and then to the 64 bit when I get done. The new Intel Fortran compiler has a lot more of intelligence in it and I am finding several problems with our 850,000 lines of Fortran code with 20,000 lines of C++ code.
This is is my third time to port to the Intel Fortran compiler. The previous two ports ran into showstoppers. The two previous ports were 20 years ago and 12 years ago. We will work through the showstoppers this time, this port cannot fail.
Junior Senior Programmer is still working on porting our user interface to Unicode. Since our Windows user interface was originally written during Windows 1.0 back in 1985, the going has been incredibly slow for the 500,000 lines of C++ code.
@Ray Thompson
"Well, taxpayers' money allocated to me. "
Your money, Ray. You earned it.
Overnight in NYFC:
"“This is an attack on the city of New York,” Mayor Eric Adams said of the violence"
Look in the mirror, Mr. Mayor.
@Nick
"What I don't know anything about is marine stuff, and wells, and septic. I think I'll get help for those. and my buddy has been the neighbor for 40+ years."
Ask your buddy about wells and septic. He probably knows who pumps out the septic, and has a good idea about who services the well, too. Give them a call and ask if they have service records, and if they offer pre-sale inspections. Well worth it.
At this point, I can do a better inspection than most home inspectors… usually just from the photos.
If I can walk in, my nose and allergies will tell me 98% of what I need to know. But I think both parents were in the house until they recently got sick.
What I don't know anything about is marine stuff, and wells, and septic. I think I'll get help for those. and my buddy has been the neighbor for 40+ years.
Yup, I can smell a sick house. When I bought this house, the carpet was 20 years old and stank. I had the house painted and the carpet replaced, now it smells good.
If your lake house has a septic tank and field, it will probably need annual pumping out at $550 per pumping. If the house has a aerobic septic system, it will need pumping out every three to five years if the air compressor and water pump / sprinklers are working ok. Replacement is $10,000. My neighbor just replaced his aerbic septic system with a 4,000 gallon system for $9,000.
The water well should flow at least 15 gpm at a good pressure. The pressure on the water well should be 45 psig for the well pump to come on and 55 psig to turn off. The tank should be 40 gallons to 120 gallons (if you are lucky) and well insulated. The pump is 120 feet to 500 feet down in the ground so it does not need insulation but it needs to be at least 20 to 30 feet below the water level. Replacement is $10,000. I put a new water well in my office complex in 2013 for $9,800 as the water level dropped below the pump in the drought and the pump burned up.
Dilbert: Futurist Of The Year
https://dilbert.com/strip/2022-01-22
May you live a long life can be a curse.
Microsoft wants you to use COM to talk to 64 bit Office from 32 bit software and vice versa.
If you just hook Office to read the file formats, the third party libraries to read things like Excel and Word files are pretty good these days. I used the Python libraries hooking one C/C++ API to process Excel spreadsheets of vehicle dimensions at the previous previous job.
Microsoft wants you to use COM to talk to 64 bit Office from 32 bit software and vice versa.
If you just hook Office to read the file formats, the third party libraries to read things like Excel and Word files are pretty good these days. I used the Python libraries hooking one C/C++ API to process Excel spreadsheets of vehicle dimensions at the previous previous job.
COM does not work for complicated Excel VBA code calling DLLs with 50+ entry points.
@Nick
"What I don't know anything about is marine stuff, and wells, and septic. I think I'll get help for those. and my buddy has been the neighbor for 40+ years."
Ask your buddy about wells and septic. He probably knows who pumps out the septic, and has a good idea about who services the well, too. Give them a call and ask if they have service records, and if they offer pre-sale inspections. Well worth it.
Good idea. Pulling the water well and ascertaining the water level is a $1,000 to $1,500 inspection. Requires a one ton truck with a mounted PTO crane. Of course, that is the complete inspection, there is a pressure tank inspection also that is much cheaper.
I need to get my water well pulled at the office soon. I am getting sand and air in the office building pipes. Looks like the sand filter on the well pump has come loose again.
Poor bastard. I’m working on an iOS Swift project and ran into that Unicode b.s. again yesterday. Each time I encounter it I have to go re-read the Apple documentation on how to do bog-standard string interpolation tasks.
Regarding wells …. had one at a previous house.
One thing to check is if there is any pump action when all water faucets turned off, or you shut off water at the main house entry point. The water pressure at the well-head should stay constant if no water being used.
My house had a shutoff valve at the house entry point. So a plastic pipe from the well to that point, about 150'. I vaguely recall (this is about 15 years ago) that there must have been a minor water leak between the well and the house. When we moved out, we got a higher than expected final electric bill due to the leak turning on the pump.
While living there, I had to replace the pressure tank (bladder) thing at the well head due to a slow air leak.
And a mothball in the relay switch at the well will keep the bugs out. I had to clean out the dead earwig bugs occasionally that would cause the relay not to work. No relay work, no water.
Had a in-ground septic tank there also. Didn't have to service it during the 5 years we were there. Did dump some septic tank treatment down the toilet every once in a while to keep the septic bugs happy.
Swift isn't about a better way to write apps. It is Apple making sure that the data model doesn't get written in Boost/C++ and find its way to an Android port.
Well, I've been in this house since early '92. The well has just worked. I did get a bunch of ants in the pressure switch. Of course I was in the shower and all soaped up when the water quit. Mom was like "why are you naked?" Cleaned the ants out of the switch with a paint brush and soaked it with Raid. No more problems.
My pressure tank has a bladder. I let the system drain down about every five years and check the pressure. I think it's supposed to be 40 PSI. It has a label. It's never needed after the first time, more that a couple of pounds of air.
Septic tank, just get it pumped. Maybe $250 here. It's been about 5 years. You don't want the solids going out to the lateral field. That's why you get it pumped out.
Yeast down the toilet? Don't know if that actually works but why not?
Mostly, NO grease.
Ok. Heads up.
The guy that used to own one of the local ISP's built and sent me a Pi-Hole. $100. Worth every penny.
I told him some folks here are interested. That someone in Switzerland wanted one. And someone else said the Pi stuff configuration varies depending on model.
He said " The Pi software is the same across all the Pi hardware so I would be willing to ship out configured SD cards. What is the Site name where you were getting the interest. "
And Butch will perhaps show up here in a couple of days.
No idea what he will charge. I'm not getting a kickback. But if you're on the "huh, how do I make this work" fence, here you go.
A pre-configured card and a shopping list. Perfect.
Re, the Pi-Hole – open source, docs including install instructions here: https://docs.pi-hole.net/ . Also included configuration after install. Main site is https://pi-hole.net/ .
I note from their site that "Pi-Hole" is a registered trademark:
So I guess that I have to use "Pi-hole®".
Looks like PJ Media is getting Ddos’ed from the Cloudflare redirect page (that never actually redirected). Interesting.
π-trap
Creative Commons License
Yes, sign me up. I don’t want to do a bunch of arcane commands then recompile the kernel. My propeller head days are over.
The pi-thingy doesn't require a bunch of arcane commands, at least according to the quick read I did. You do have to have the Pi OS running, then one command to add the pi-thingy to it.
Or, you have to have a supported Linux-based OS already running….which requires a bunch of arcane commands.
Then you do have to configure your routers to point to the pi-thingy as the DNS server. And any other devices. Not clear if our Swiss friend's system needs additional acane commands to do the final configuration.
uBlock Origin works good enough for me to block most ads. The ones it doesn't block I just ignore. YMMV.
Yep, except all the places that ublock can't run… which is almost all the devices here at stately Nick Manor….
n
…so maybe you are used to 'arcane commands' ….
Poor bastard. I’m working on an iOS Swift project and ran into that Unicode b.s. again yesterday. Each time I encounter it I have to go re-read the Apple documentation on how to do bog-standard string interpolation tasks.
I started programming in 1975 on Univac 1108. 6 bits a byte, six bytes a word, 36 bits for a word, upper case ASCII only. We ported to the CDC 7600 in 1976, 6 bits a byte, ten bytes a word, 60 bits for a word, upper case ASCII only. We ported to the IBM 370 mainframe in 1978, 8 bits a byte, four bytes a word, 32 bits for a word, upper and lower case ASCII. Oh boy, that four bytes to a word caused us major trouble since we had assumed that we were always gonna have six bytes to a word. We had a lot of integers with six characters (Hollerith) in them that we had to change to two integers.
Now we've got this double byte stuff going on. What a freaking mess ! Why couldn't they have come up with UTF-8 to start with ?
Seven baby rabbits. Tiny baby got squished beneath its siblings overnight. Rough being tiny. Seven remaining are plump and vigorous.
@nick
All the good stuff is in the trailer. None of the characters make any of the obvious phone calls. Things end badly for the tiger. It’s a terrible movie on so many levels. Poor acting. Stereotyping and wokeness. Nonsensical ending. Plot that requires constant suspension of disbelief. My tiger loving kid didn’t like it. There was potential, it should have been at least an interesting movie.
Bleh.
Bribe the kid out of it. Tell kid how it ends. It’a an awful movie.
Apropos yesterday's comments
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/career-advancement-tied-whether-you-have-kids-chinas-birth-rate-hits-record-low
n