Sat. Apr. 30, 2022 – may go north today…

By on April 30th, 2022 in dogs, government, lakehouse, personal

Forecast for another nice day.  Yesterday certainly was nice, although humid.   Evening was very nice.  It’s nice when it is nice out.  So nice.

Did some errands.  Picked up some stuff. Took the smaller kid to swim practice.   Talked to a septic contractor.

Today I’ll take the smaller kid to swim, then either head to the lake, or work around the house.  I really need to get up there, but there is a ton of stuff to do here too.  Having my wife and one kid out of the house makes it easier to do stuff here so I should take advantage of that, right?  Oh, and the HVAC contractor wants to look around again and get a contract signed and I’d have to be here for that.

On the other hand, not having D1 here to manage the dog means I have to do it.  That complicates going to the BOL, as he can’t be trusted not to bolt.  I did not and do not want to be one of those people who are bullied by a pet, arranging everything around that pet.  Him climbing onto the kitchen table is pretty close to the last straw.  No good solutions to this problem.

I guess we’ll just have to play it by ear.

There is always something you can be stacking, always something that will improve your position.  Find that thing, and stack it, find that thing and do it.

nick

71 Comments and discussion on "Sat. Apr. 30, 2022 – may go north today…"

  1. Pecancorner says:

    ‘We believe that the first tranche of those drones should be arriving in the region today, but not all 121. the first tranche of them will be arriving in the region today,’ said the official at Friday’s briefing. 

    That use of the word ‘tranche’ annoys me. I think of tranche as a financial word, not a bunch of concrete things, and it makes the person using it sound like they are talking about Wall street instead of goods.   “Lot” or “shipment” would have been better choices.  

    I know…. I’m an old fogey.   

    Inputting my user id and email. Hopefully I remember the right one this time LOL

  2. Nick Flandrey says:

    Up and headed to swim practice soon.   75F and 94%RH but sunny.   I dont’ think the humidity will ‘burn off’.

    Woke in the middle of the night with muscle cramps so bad I was nauseous.   Very strange.

    Not in any mood to drive north atm.

    n

  3. Greg Norton says:

    The military industrial complex will be testing some new weapons in live fire drills in the Ukraine…

    Lots of McMansions and German grocery getters in the DC suburbs depend on military industrial complex jobs. 

    The last place I worked was a wannabe DoD contractor based in … Alexandria. That’s funny – I’m not even sure.

    Clapper was on the advisory board until the Hunter Biden laptop fiasco turned real. Crowe is still on the board, and he was one of the proponents of using the 25th Amendment to remove Trump.

  4. SteveF says:

    I was nauseous.

    You certainly were. /rbt

  5. Greg Norton says:

    That use of the word ‘tranche’ annoys me. I think of tranche as a financial word, not a bunch of concrete things, and it makes the person using it sound like they are talking about Wall street instead of goods.   “Lot” or “shipment” would have been better choices.  

    The press will get fascinated by a word and beat it to death.

    “Provenance” was one for a while, after the “Portlandia” sketch about the organic chicken’s origins.

    The funny thing is that the word doesn’t appear in the sketch.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G__PVLB8Nm4

  6. Greg Norton says:

    Right now, I despise the word “kiddos”. I think my generation uses it too much.

  7. Greg Norton says:

    I also hate “I’m jus’ sayin’”. That strikes me as very Amish female when someone drops that.

  8. SteveF says:

    “I’m jus’ sayin’”. That strikes me as very Amish

    Hillbilly, I would say. I grew up with Amish and Mennonites around but didn’t deal with them much, so maybe they say it, too. But the small-town and mountain hicks when I was a kid all said “jes’ sayin’”. I seldom say it now, and almost only when I’m joking around or playing the hick.

  9. Pecancorner says:

    The press will get fascinated by a word and beat it to death.

    “Provenance” was one for a while, after the “Portlandia” sketch about the organic chicken’s origins.

    The funny thing is that the word doesn’t appear in the sketch.

    Agreed. Half the reason I was glad when Obama’s reign was over was so that the media would stop saying that every tiny daily event was  “historic”.   

    @Rick, no complaint, just FYI, the cookie isn’t saving my info. I entered it again for this post after selecting “save my info” on the previous one. 

  10. MrAtoz says:

    My info isn’t being saved either.

  11. MrAtoz says:

    ISE, but my post made it through.

  12. Nick Flandrey says:

    There was a comic routine about “ I’m just saying” and how it was an excuse to bully and berate.   It’s not that that you are ugly and fat, I’m just saying that a bag over your head would improve both things…

    Every time I hear the phrase, I hear my dad quoting someone “ Many a true word is said in jest.”

    N

  13. Nick Flandrey says:

    I hate”kiddos” too especially from teachers.   Someone here linked to the reason they use it, and it wasn’t benign.

    N

  14. Greg Norton says:

    There was a comic routine about “ I’m just saying” and how it was an excuse to bully and berate.   It’s not that that you are ugly and fat, I’m just saying that a bag over your head would improve both things…

    Every time I hear the phrase, I hear my dad quoting someone “ Many a true word is said in jest.”

    Amish women are very much into bullying and berating as a path to power when logic fails.

    Some things that have reemerged into the light this week since the Progs started their meltdown over Musk buying twitter is this video of what happened to the Minneapolis Mayor after he told the crowd that he wasn’t really going to defund the police.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3v0YLrQ8r4M

  15. dcp says:

    “I’m jus’ sayin’”. That strikes me as very Amish

    Huh.  I associate it with New Yorkers.  Perhaps because of Paul Reiser.  Or maybe Jerry Seinfeld.

  16. Geoff Powell says:

    I’m jus’ sayin’

    Suggests lower-class African-American to this right-pondian.

    G.

    Uh… Can I say that?

  17. Greg Norton says:

    Huh.  I associate it with New Yorkers.  Perhaps because of Paul Reiser.  Or maybe Jerry Seinfeld.

    Maybe both. They had similar acts when they emerged from obscurity in the 80s.

    The HBO series spoofing “60 Minutes” in the early 80s, “The Investigators” used Reiser and Seinfeld interchangeably as “Andy Rooney”-type commentators in the segment at the end of the show.

  18. Greg Norton says:

    Suggests lower-class African-American to this right-pondian.

    G.

    Uh… Can I say that?

    Say “Amish”. Regulars here will know.

    Here in the US, I hear it a lot as a desperation tactic in a discussion of current events in the suburbs of the two tech hubs where we’ve lived in the last decade. Last week’s action against Disney in Florida and Elon Musk buying Twitter this week has made a lot of people living around me more desperate so I expect that I will hear it even more heading into the Summer and as election season rolls around.

    Robert Francis is almost double digit percentage points down in the Governor’s race even from polls conducted by the leftist publications like the Texas Tribune. November is still a long way away, however.

  19. CowboyStu says:

    Here is the one that I think is stupid:  “…, you know, …”.

    Well, if they think that I know, why are they telling me?

  20. ITGuy1998 says:

    https://www.thedrive.com/news/dozens-of-low-mile-2-7l-ford-bronco-engines-have-already-failed

    Old advice still holds true – don’t buy the first year of a new model.

  21. Greg Norton says:

    Old advice still holds true – don’t by the first year of a new model.

    Especially Ford in the last 20 years.

    That engine doesn’t make sense in a vehicle like the full size Bronco, but Ford has to push them for CAFE reasons.

  22. SteveF says:

    Say “Amish”. Regulars here will know.

    -facepalm- My comment above mentioning the Amish was referring to actual, you know, Amish.

  23. SteveF says:

    Well, if they think that I know, why are they telling me?

    To set context for comments to follow.

    To induce the listener to think about what he just said or did, in light of something that he knows but wasn’t thinking about.

    To pressure someone into agreeing with what you’re saying regardless of what he does know or believe.

  24. Nick Flandrey says:

    I went looking for the link, and found that only I and Jenny have ever used “kiddo” and my only use was today!

    @Jenny, call your daughter what you want to, especially here where some discretion is called for.

    I dislike it when teachers do it.   They also call them babies far too long.

  25. MrAtoz says:

    I dislike it when teachers do it.   They also call them babies far too long.

    According to plugs, kids in public school belong to the teachers. So there.

  26. MrAtoz says:

    My info is being saved again.

  27. Greg Norton says:

    Shots Fired After Antifa Terrorists Attack People’s Convoy in Portland by Throwing Paint and Projectiles Onto Vehicles From Freeway Overpass (VIDEO)

    Are things getting sporty?

    It looks like Antifa is branching out in PDX. That’s pretty far from their home base area, however.

    The convoy would have been better off avoiding that section of the freeway system. ODOT is running tolling surveillance experiments with various vendors on 205 just north of Oregon City.

  28. JimB says:

    Teachers call school children babies, but Doctor Johnny Fever calls us Fellow Babies! 🙂

  29. Greg Norton says:

    I dislike it when teachers do it.   They also call them babies far too long.

    Babies. Yes. Elementary school is too old.

    I stated that I think “kiddos” is overused. I didn’t mean to offend. With the band director at our high school, it was his tell for lying, particularly whenever he blew his budget, which was often.

    He’s the reason I really came to hate it.

  30. Greg Norton says:

    Teachers call school children babies, but Doctor Johnny Fever calls us Fellow Babies! 

    Don Sturdy. Fever gets a pass because Howard Hesseman really was an AOR DJ pioneer in San Francisco in the early70s — actual DJ schtick.

    Hugh Wilson had a very free hand with casting with the exception of Gary Sandy.

    Wilson is a UofF legend.

    WKRP and Gatorade.

  31. Greg Norton says:

    Yes, yes. He screwed up. Fine, but Wall Street wants Chapek.

    https://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/tourism/os-bz-disney-desantis-pr-fired-20220429-gyo6e3l3trgrxm5m5wylkgcn5m-story.html

    Three months.

    Time to figure out how to splice Baby Yoda into “Doctor Strange 2”.

  32. Jenny says:

    @nick

    No good solutions to this problem.

    Crate train and train a recall. Suzanne Garrett’s DVD ‘Crate Games’ is something the children could do. 
    Coming when called – the clever fog owner trains two recalls. One casual when it doesn’t matter whether the dog comes or not, then the emergency recall. Casual recall is sloppily trained and what most people have, cue word is typically the dogs name or come and is what most people mean when they say their fog comes when called. 
     

    Emergency recall is deliberately and carefully trained using a mix of classical and operant conditioning with a heavy emphasis on the classical so it becomes an automatic response to hearing a carefully chosen cue used ONKY when the recall be heavily and immediately reinforced (training) or in a genuine emergency (dog bolted into traffic).

    Book / video ‘Really Reliable Recall’ is best tool if you don’t have a local class. A month of deliberate training can get you most of the way there. 
     

    Pick up a copy of ‘Little Dogs: Training Your Pint Sized Companion’, put dog on a twice a day feeding schedule so he gets hungry, and spend 5-10 minutes a day training. Yeah, I know, everybody in the house was going to train, however at this point your the responsible adult who is impacted. 

    Fenzi Dog Sports Academy offers online classes you take at your own pace. Good resource.
     

    A trained dog is an asset to the prepped household.

    And all that said – I’m a hypocrite. I went from teaching classes and taking ribbons at competition with my awesome well trained dogs (pre parenthood), to kenneling them when visitors are over because the current pair are untrained savages by comparison. I’m exaggerating a little bit but the contrast in behavior is marked. 5-10 minutes a day consistently done would fix 75% of my woe.

    @Greg
    Word ‘kiddo’. I hear that word often and I hate it. The frequency of it being uttered in my presence worms it into my vocabulary. I usually catch and correct it to ‘child’. Mildly horrified when it slips past my inner editor. I don’t like the diminutive nature, the dismissive unpersoning it seems to inflict. I‘m ok with kid, much prefer child, youngster, young adult, etc. You know, real words.

    @Geoff

    I was wondering the same thing and I have the same association. I tend to use the phrase sarcastically with a side of mild meanie. And generally regret when it passes my lips  lazy language. English is a beautiful complex language and doesn’t deserve the lax abuse it currently suffers.

    @Greg

    Northman was probably a good movie, I think I wasn’t sufficiently bloody minded when I saw it. I felt regret at the waste and cruelty as I left the theater. This weekend will probably be The Bad Guys cartoon with my child. I think there is also a school play I am trying to weasel out of.

    Woke up with hand cramps around 3 am. Knife work yesterday and inadequate water. Got up and read and drank water until 5 am, then slept until an appalling 10 am. 
     

    Today is music and yard work, and setting up the mesh electric fence for the chickens in the front yard. I’m tempted to set it up in the overgrown terraced garden to see what the chickens can do for me on tearing up the overgrownness of it. Oh and freezing yesterday’s five rabbits.

    That $600 Seagull guitar made of cherry was gone when I took my pro musician friend to help me compare it to my current Seagull guitar. 11 weeks of resisting a powerful temptation rewarded. Mix of regret and relief. Want and need are different.

  33. Nick Flandrey says:

    Are things getting sporty?

    –well, throwing objects from an overpass is attempted murder.  That has been pretty well established, I think.   Someone tries to murder you, you murder them right back…    IIRC they’ve sent juveniles to prison for decades for doing it.

    There are places where it’s been sporty and will be again.   The pacnorthwest being just one.

    As we enter summer, I expect the political violence to increase, and don’t expect to hear much about it.   With dems in charge, it doesn’t reflect well on them to have organized violence in the cities, so media will downplay it, or just not report at all.  The progs are p!ssed like everyone else and will be having trouble feeding their kids too.  They are unable to blame the dems, so their compartmentalized and fragmented brains will blame “the ruling class” and somehow make that equal to repugs and conservatives.  That their enemies are white males entirely should go without saying at this point.

    I’ve been recommending that everyone add body armor to their preps for some time.    That may sound crazy to some, but there are a couple of dead people who were at various protests that would be alive today if they’d been wearing a vest.   In one case the killer suicided by cop, the other is walking around free.

    – on a related subject, if you watched the vids or read the articles I linked about the Baldwin shooting that were released this week, you should have noticed that EVERY THING was on a camera.   No one was mirandized, but their statements are VERY MUCH being held against them.  It can be as trivial as being painted as a self centered @sshole, or taken as damning evidence against you.   If you are involved in ANYTHING with political or life and death implications, take two deep breaths and shut the F up.  The same goes for your electronic communication.   Do you think the AD’s friends commiserating with him by text thought they’d be in the national news for their comments?  Or the “armorer’s”  conversations with her mentor would be used to paint her as the villian?  (regardless of if she is.)  Make a voice call if you feel the need.  Have a face to face conversation.   Those are both harder to bug, and have a higher bar for use.   IANAL, but this is consistent with the advice given by actual lawyers.

    And if you carry or have a gun in the car or home, sign up with one of the legal defense insurance/lawyer prepaid plans.   Normal attorneys are used to defending guilty people.  They are not experts in defensive gun use.   You need someone who understands your situation if you have to defend yourself, and knows how those laws apply to YOU.

    With changes in the country and the economy and subsequent increases in political and criminal violence, your chances of needing to defend yourself or your loved ones have increased.   Take a few minutes to reassess your assumptions about  your risks and possible responses.

    n

  34. Nick Flandrey says:

    A couple of days ago I mentioned this article in Electronic Design magazine

    https://www.electronicdesign.com/markets/automotive/article/21235580/electronic-design-how-much-longer-will-it-take-to-fix-the-chip-shortage 

    “What auto makers were unfamiliar with was the process of how chips are made and the complexity behind that,” said Gehrmann. While it usually only takes a single day to manufacture a vehicle from start to finish, the average chip has a front-end production cycle of 12 to 24 weeks. Additionally, it takes 4 to 8 weeks on the back-end to package and test it before the finished chip is finally shipped to the customer. 

    “The fact that producing a single chip can take six months was hard to understand,” said Gehrmann. 

    When Will It Finally End?

    Unless there is a sudden drop in demand, the chip shortage will not be over anytime soon, analysts said. 

    Most industry executives warn the shortage will likely not ease before the second half of 2022, with some products continuing to be delayed by a deficiency of chips in 2023.

    Although the chip shortages are broad-based, the companies feeling the pain most acutely are those trying to buy chips based on long-lasting legacy nodes, specifically microcontrollers widely used in cars as well as a wide range of analog and power management ICs.

    The industry is warning these constraints will not be resolved for some time. GlobalFoundries, the largest U.S.-based contract chip maker, said that wafer capacity for its more mature nodes is sold out through 2023 even as it plans to boost its production capacity by 50% in the same span.

    The route out of the global chip shortage is complicated by the supply chain’s vastness, which leaves it exposed to unpredictable events, according to Avnet VP of global supplier development Peggy Carrieres.

    The components in an average chip, from the intellectual property used to design it to the blank wafers used to build it, can travel 25,000 miles and cross over 70 international borders before a customer gets its hands on the final chip, according to a report released by the Global Semiconductor Alliance in 2020.

    A disruption at any point in the supply chain—caused by a once-in-a-century pandemic, a massive fire at a fab, or sanctions imposed as part of a trade war—can snag production, straining supply and hiking prices.

    –it’s not gonna get better any time soon.  

    n

  35. Nick Flandrey says:

    The same issue of ED had these additional articles on the chip shortages.  Almost everything we use has chips in it, or relies on chips for its manufacture.   This is as big a deal as food shortages.

    https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/embedded-revolution/article/21235575/electronic-design-staying-a-step-ahead-of-the-global-chip-shortage 

    https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/analog/article/21215272/electronic-design-us-warns-chip-shortage-to-last-into-late-2022-as-inventories-dip 

    There are national defense issues as well–

    https://thehill.com/policy/defense/3465231-raytheon-ceo-warns-of-delays-in-stinger-missile-production/ 

    Raytheon Technologies, the maker of the thousands of Stinger missiles sent to Ukraine amid its war with Russia, will not be able to quickly produce more of the weapons due to lack of parts and materials, the company’s CEO said Tuesday. 

    Raytheon won’t be able to ramp up production of Stinger anti-aircraft systems until at least 2023, as the company must “redesign some of the electronics in the missile and the seeker head,” due to some components no longer being commercially available, CEO Greg Hayes told investors during a Tuesday earnings call. 

    That redesign is “going to take us a little bit of time,” Hayes said. 

    n

  36. Nick Flandrey says:

    So the Disney PR guy was a Pentagon insider and political appointee, and the woman who will take over from him is also a political appointee…

    Chapek said Kristina Schake would now lead Disney’s communications efforts, serving as executive vice president of global communications, reporting directly to him. Before Disney, Schake held roles leading President Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine education program and also worked for the Obama White House.

    Do they not realize that political hacks never pay for their own missteps?

    The orlando paper had a bit more substantive coverage than GP

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/04/high-level-disney-executive-leaving-company/ 

    but I SEE the GP links and don’t go looking at Orlando papers, except during the opening months of wuflu…

    n

  37. Lynn says:

    Drove across south Texas yesterday to Victoria.  Dad and I went to see Liam Neeson’s new movie, “Memory”.   Pretty good movie if you like action movies about old contract killers.

    Had a fun time driving between Wharton and El Campo.  There was a guy pulling a double wide house trailer down I69 running 50 mph blocking both lanes.  I hung back and just watched as that double wide trailer was moving all over the place.

    Then the pickup behind me went around me and starting to pass the double wide on the right shoulder.  At the same time, an suv started to pass on the left shoulder.  The peterbuilt pulling the  double wide moved over onto the right shoulder and the black pickup went into the grass at 80 mph.  He must of been AWD as all four of his wheels were rooster tailing grass.  He barely missed a speed limit sign as he slammed on the brakes and pulled back in next to me.  

    What the 10 or 12 of us did not know was that the double wide had a overloaded dump truck in front of it pouring out black smoke from both stacks at 50 mph and the double wide was trying to pass him.  The double wide gave up trying to pass the dump truck and we all passed him carefully.  I think Mr black pickup needed a new pair of underwear. 

  38. Rick H says:

    Regarding the comment box not remembering who you are:

    The values for author name and email are stored in a cookie in the browser you are using. The values are ‘comment_author’ and ‘comment_author_email’ followed by a randomized GUID value.

    If those two cookies are not there, then you get the name/email prompt in the comment box. Those that clear their cookies for any reason on this site will have to enter their name/email again for the next comment.

    Regarding changes to the comment box:

    A slightly enhanced version of the CKEditor5 was installed last Monday afternoon. It added the super and subscript buttons, and the code/codeblock buttons. (Equivalent HTML codes are ‘sup’, ‘sub’,, and ‘code’. The ‘code’ tag is used for a code text inside a paragraph. The ‘codeblock’ tag is used across multiple lines.

    If any pasted text contains those tags, even if hidden inside your copied text, they will be used as such. This may be the issue with Nick’s complaint about something he pasted. (Nick: your email to me with that content didn’t show any of those tags, but that could have been filtered by the mail process.)

    If you paste in code, and it looks funny, you can edit the comment and look for any HTML tags that might have caused the issue. Or, you can ‘paste plain’ with Ctrl+Shift+V.

    As for the slowness of the site, it’s still an issue with the  Bing-bot indexing the site. I did install a caching plugin on Tuesday, but there will only be a cache of a page that has been previously visited by someone. A new page – or one with new comments – will not necessarily appear in the cache.

    There’s no real clean or consistent way to block the indexing bots. Their IP address changes, and blocking by the content header (which contains the browser name, among other things) is also not consistently the same.

    There is the possibility of adding some java-script that will only display comments on a button click; still looking into that. That would present only the post and not comments to the search bots. But that would result in the comments on posts not being indexed by the various search engines.

  39. Ray Thompson says:

    New modem arrives Tuesday. I am a beta tester. Can’t say for whom. I have been told to not activate the modem until given instructions. I must use the app on the phone to activate. What that has to do with the modem is a mystery as that is a problem on my ISP. I get to keep the modem when the testing is all over. I am to allow remote connections to my computer so the company can get metrics and other information. It would seem the company would allow remote access to their modem rather than my computer, then disable when the testing is over. Or would they? I figure it is worth it for a modem that will probably retail for close to $400.00. Won’t improve my internet speeds as my current modem handles the speed quite nicely.

  40. Lynn says:

    Woke in the middle of the night with muscle cramps so bad I was nauseous.   Very strange.

    Please tell me you are watching your blood pressure.

  41. Greg Norton says:

    Northman was probably a good movie, I think I wasn’t sufficiently bloody minded when I saw it. I felt regret at the waste and cruelty as I left the theater. This weekend will probably be The Bad Guys cartoon with my child. I think there is also a school play I am trying to weasel out of.

    We felt “meh” about “Everything Everywhere All At Once”. Consider yourself warned if that flick is out your way this weekend.

    It wasn’t “Supercop 3”, which the theater made the mistake of showing clips from as part of their usual excellent preshow.

    The one constant complaint we’ve heard about “The Northman” is the violence.

  42. Greg Norton says:

    but I SEE the GP links and don’t go looking at Orlando papers, except during the opening months of wuflu

    The Sentinel canned or early retired a lot of their long-time staff at the end of 2019 and closed their physical newsroom in August 2020. Their pandemic coverage has been biased against DeSantis, but the Disney beat reporters are usually fair.

  43. Greg Norton says:

    This weekend will probably be The Bad Guys cartoon with my child. I think there is also a school play I am trying to weasel out of.

    Next weekend will be “Doctor Strange 2” stuffed with as many cameos as The Mouse could film between the opening weekend of “Spiderman” in December and a few weeks ago.

    The big rumor is Patrick Stewart as Professor X, probably shot in the hope that the second season of “Picard” would end big the day before the movie opened.

    The penultimate episode for the season showed us Picard’s mother … [spoiler] … I’ll leave it at the Disney execs were probably thinking of doing the same thing at the end of their screening on Thursday.

    Ever since I saw this trailer and heard the audience reaction a few weeks ago, I’ve had the strange feeling that the flick is going to make a ton of money.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hldGGWN9HcI

    “Sex sells, baby.”

  44. Lynn says:

    https://www.thedrive.com/news/dozens-of-low-mile-2-7l-ford-bronco-engines-have-already-failed

    Old advice still holds true – don’t buy the first year of a new model.

    One of my friends has that engine in a 2016 F-150 with the 10 speed automatic.  He loves his truck, no problems at all and gets 20 mpg in the city.

    I’ll bet somebody at Ford changed the valve metallurgy and overhardened it, making the valves brittle.  Not good.

  45. MrAtoz says:

    This is just sad:

    New Discovery+ show will follow five teen drag queens to document their drag journey

    I wonder if Discovery+ will follow them after the series to see how they fair in the real world. Or, nah.

    Added: My info was gone again. I’ve made sure last time the box was checked. I haven’t cleared cookies. The last couple of posts have retained data.

  46. MrAtoz says:

    The penultimate episode for the season showed us Picard’s mother … [spoiler] …

    The deep dive into Picard’s childhood is so dark it is a turn off. Also, all the other characters drama is really crippling the series. Where’s Q?

  47. Greg Norton says:

    The deep dive into Picard’s childhood is so dark it is a turn off. Also, all the other characters drama is really crippling the series. Where’s Q?

    Last season had the “Nepthene” episode. We don’t even get that this year.

    I was willing to say all was forgiven if Jay Karnes had turned out to be a reprisal of his character from “Voyager” instead of a weak Fox Mulder nod.

    If they wanted to do that, get David Duchovny. The entire season would have been forgiven.

    Or David Duchovny as the Vulcan who attempts the mindmeld. Something.

  48. Greg Norton says:

    The deep dive into Picard’s childhood is so dark it is a turn off. Also, all the other characters drama is really crippling the series. Where’s Q?

    Delancie isn’t the only canon Q. Where is Suzy Plakson to dig Q out of the hole he’s dug for himself?

    Heck, I’d even like to see Corben Bernsen. They did location shooting not far from 444 Flower.

  49. ITGuy1998 says:

    My son officially has car fever. Almost suddenly, he is obsessed with cars. His favorite is the Dodge Challenger, but he’s also fond of the Camaro. I just laugh and tell him he’s free to get whatever he wants when he is off of my insurance, so after college at the earliest. The 4cyl Tacoma will serve him just fine until then.

    We went to a local car show this afternoon. It was fairly small, about 30 cars, but a nice mix of old and new. I think we will be hitting a lot of shows this summer.

  50. Greg Norton says:

    If you can afford it, the speed offered by the Apple Silicon is impressive. Though, I wasn’t sad about the performance of the “obsolete” $6000 last generation 64 GB MacBook Pro my last employer issued.

    http://hrtapps.com/blogs/20220427/

  51. drwilliams says:

    @Rick

    If those two cookies are not there, then you get the name/email prompt in the comment box. Those that clear their cookies for any reason on this site will have to enter their name/email again for the next comment.

    On the mobile yesterday, the first time I posted I had to re-enter name and email. Forgot to hit the “Remember Me” button.

    I did hit it the second time. It did not remember me the third time. 

    No system upgrades prior to the problem. Phone was not even turned off previous day, just sleeping.

    This is the first post of the day from my desktop. No name or email in the boxes.

    Thanks again for yeoman work on this website. I know the little problems can be maddening. 

    Let us know if we need to send chocolate.

  52. Nightraker says:

    “Let us know if we need to send chocolate.”

    Money. Lawyers. Guns.

     🙂

  53. Pecancorner says:

    The one constant complaint we’ve heard about “The Northman” is the violence.

    The “red band trailer” makes it look like the rescue sequence from The Patriot (aka Tomahawk scene) laid over the Thirteenth Warrior, over and over. And a nod to Ahnold’s Conan the Barbarian as a boy.    

    For clarity: I am accepting all cookies (and ads) from this site. I’ve not cleared cookies nor closed the browser since posting this morning, and still need to enter my credentials.  I’m using Ubuntu on  Windows 10 on a computer.  

    EDIT to add: Eureka! My info is prefilled after posting this! Thanks for the repair, Rick! 🙂

  54. RickH says:

    @pecancorner…. I didn’t fix anything but I’ll take the credit.

    It all depends on whether the cookie is in your browser.  It’s a standard WordPress function.  Not overriden by theme or plug-ins installed. 

  55. Greg Norton says:

    “The one constant complaint we’ve heard about “The Northman” is the violence.”

    The “red band trailer” makes it look like the rescue sequence from The Patriot (aka Tomahawk scene) laid over the Thirteenth Warrior, over and over. And a nod to Ahnold’s Conan the Barbarian as a boy.    

    That’s probably deliberate. People remember “The Patriot” fondly, and “King Conan” most likely won’t get made at this point. 

    The trailer is often put together by someone in marketing. “Last Night In Soho” tried to invoke fond memories of Matt Smith in “The Crown” and “Doctor Who”.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcVnFrxjPjI

    “Good Omens” was even more blatant with many of the “Doctor Who” craft people involved in the production. The message was “Remember when ‘Doctor Who’ didn’t suck?”

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=On0RbFjh8tI

    Neil Gaiman even wrote one of the best new era “Doctor Who” episodes.

  56. Greg Norton says:

    The orlando paper had a bit more substantive coverage than GP

    Ah, but Tyler Durden cowardice protects disclosure about the specifics about what she did in the Obama White House.

    https://www.zerohedge.com/political/not-right-fit-disney-exec-who-led-anti-florida-bill-response-leaves-firm-after-3-months

  57. Nick Flandrey says:

    @rick, that is the way the cookie is SUPPOSED to work, but it wasn’t working that way.   I was logged in and it still had the blank name and email boxes.   I filled them in, made sure the ‘remember me’ box was checked, hit submit.

    The same exact sequence three times for three comments on my phone… to no avail.

    Then same things happening at home.  Something was borked.   

    At the moment, I’m logged in and the comment box is normal, ie, no name and email fields.

    Very strange when things magically break and fix themselves.

    Also, I had a note on my dashboard to clear the cache for under the “Performance”  heading.  I didn’t.   It’s gone now…  never saw that before.

    n

  58. Nick Flandrey says:

    “protects disclosure about the specifics about what she did in the Obama White House.”

    – noticed that too?   Pretty vague.   If it was something impressive, I’m sure it would have been listed.   The way it was written, she could have been the coffee service.

    n

  59. Nick Flandrey says:

    Watched “batteries not included” with D2.   Spielberg /  Marshall movie from the ‘80s.    Hume Cronin starring…   Really good.  I didn’t remember much, and even though it’s predictable once the macguffin is revealed, it’s still charming and full of a broad range of emotion and flawed characters.  Definitely stood the test of time.  And not a kid in it.

    Also a neat time capsule glimpse of pre-Disney Times Square, without celebrating the depravity.  

    n

  60. RickH says:

    @rick, that is the way the cookie is SUPPOSED to work, but it wasn’t working that way.   I was logged in and it still had the blank name and email boxes.   I filled them in, made sure the ‘remember me’ box was checked, hit submit.

    If the two cookies are not there, then you have to enter your name/email. Them’s the rules – it’s how the code works. If your browser or device is not allowing the cookie to be stored when you say ‘remember me’, then it is not the site code (WordPress or theme or any plugin).  It is your browser/device not storing (or maybe retrieving) the cookie.

    If you are on a non-phone device, using FireFox or Chrome, you can go into Developer mode (F9?) and look at the setting where you will see the cookie (if it is set). If you don’t see the name/email prompt, then the cookie is there. If you see the name/email prompt, then the cookie is not there. And you can verify it either way by looking at Developer mode on a browser that allows that (probably not phones).

    If your device is not storing the cookie, then you will get to enter your name/email. The “remember me” checkbox is the one that does the cookie save. The next time the comment box loads, the code looks for the cookie. If found, no name/email box. If not found, no name/email box.

    It is not the WP code, nor the theme, nor any plugins that is not allowing the save/retrieve of the cookie (and therefore the need to enter name/email). It is the browser. Or a setting in your browser that disables cookies. 

  61. RickH says:

    @nick:

    Also, I had a note on my dashboard to clear the cache for under the “Performance”  heading.  I didn’t.   It’s gone now…  never saw that before.

    That’s from the caching plugin installed the other day. Ignore it please. (n.b. – on the admin menu bar; only admins here get to see it)

  62. Nick Flandrey says:

    It is the browser. Or a setting in your browser that disables cookies. 

    except I didn’t change any browser settings on my phone or pc, nor did anyone else, and I didn’t change them back to solve the problem.  And since more than one user had the exact same experience, with nothing in common except that we are all here, it points the finger here.

    it looks like, for some period of time, the code that sets the cookie, and the code that checks for the cookie, were not working correctly.

    And it fixed itself which is the disturbing part.

    n

  63. RickH says:

    it looks like, for some period of time, the code that sets the cookie, and the code that checks for the cookie, were not working correctly.

    The only way to tell if the cookie has been set properly  is to look in Developer’s mode for those cookie settings. Otherwise, you are just guessing at the source of the problem. But the issue is in how the browser is handling the setting/saving/retrieval of the cookies.

    There have been no changes to the site code since Monday – and that was just to add the buttons to the comment editor. Those changes did not deal with any part of cookie store/retrieval. 

  64. Lynn says:

    “Matt Walsh Tells Us How Johnny The Walrus Triggered Amazon”

    https://www.clayandbuck.com/matt-walsh-tells-us-how-johnny-the-walrus-triggered-amazon/

    “CLAY: We have Matt Walsh. But first for those of you out there that are not familiar with this story, I want to play a clip of Amazon employees losing their minds over the success of his children’s book, to kind of put into context some of the questions that we’re gonna be asking Matt here about. Let’s listen to that.”

    Wow.  Why are all of these people so woke ?

    Here is the book:

    https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1956007059?tag=ttgnet-20

  65. Nick Flandrey says:

    Seriously Disney, WTAF?

    She’s Ms Obamma’s spokesperson and ran PR for instagram ?

    Kristina Schake, hired earlier this month, will replace him as head of communications, Disney said in a statement Friday. She is a former public relations director for Instagram and served as a spokeswoman for First Lady Michelle Obama

    We can only imagine how strong her virtue-signaling game is…

    Maybe they’ve lost their way because their leader can say  things like “… guide our reputation-driving functions.”   

    n

  66. Lynn says:

    My father removed Disney Plus from their Roku and canceled the subscription. 

  67. Nick Flandrey says:

    Those changes did not deal with any part of cookie store/retrieval. 

    and yet for users on different OSs with different browsers, the site broke in exactly the same way, all  at the same time.   The chances of it being all the different browsers is pretty much zero.  The only common point of contact was the site.

    It’s fixed now, it was minor inconvenience, but it’s worrisome that things are breaking and un-breaking without intervention.

    I have a *_ cough _* significant emotional investment in this place and unexplained weirdness makes me nervous.

    n

    And who knew?  Doing the interweb thing with an * then a word, and another asterisk causes the editor to italicize the text between the  asterisks 

  68. RickH says:

    Using the asterisk pair turns to italic inside the editor, but is not stored. That is because of ‘autoformatting’ with the CKEditor5 editor seeing that combination as ‘markdown’ formatting. 

    Which, as you can see by your posted comment, it not supported by WP by default. The only place WP uses markdown is in the ‘readmes’ of plugins and themes, and displayed when looking at the plugin/theme information page.

    I have no plans on enabling markdown formatting. The buttons in the comment editor are enough for any needed formatting.

  69. Nick Flandrey says:

    I don’t have any interest in markdown formatting and I didn’t know such a thing existed.   The cough is pretty common as a signifier online.  Interesting that the editor shows the italic but it shows as text in the comment.  And fine, just different behavior than before.

    When I refreshed the page just now, I got the “first visit” popups for use of cookies, one banner at the top, with text that ends prematurely with  “Or,”   and the box on the right, with the “Got it” button.  You have to click both to make them go away.   Don’t know why they popped up or why we have two.

    n

    added – the asterisk word asterisk does show up as italic text in the comment. It shows in my first comment because I added spaces and the underscore character until I broke the italic..

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