Hot and clear, some small chance of scattered showers. But mostly it is likely to be hot and hot, with a side of hot. My weather station said 102F in the afternoon yesterday. Granted that was in the sun,but jeez.
Since my back responded well to the stretching, manipulation, and inversion table, I woke feeling pretty good. I decided I didn’t want to screw that up by unloading trash from my truck or cutting the grass. So I spent most of the day online.
Today I have to venture out and collect all the stuff. Metro shelves for the garage and storage. Another bucket of freeze dried food, and a cell booster for my client’s place. A bunch of stuff for the BOL. Typical week. Keep moving as the world does its thing…
Which seems to be continuing on the path we’ve already started down. The drums of war are beating and they won’t stop.* Various items are in short supply, and there are more of them, and the supply is shorter, from what I’m hearing. The money markets are in turmoil. People are starting to buy less, move down scale, and run out of credit card. Home sales are slowing, which is normal when rates increase, but a lot of people are going to feel a lot less rich when they are making two mortgage payments, waiting for a house to sell.
There are HUGE new developments going in all around the Houston metro area in green field developments. They are tearing down warehouse and industrial space to build apartments and condos, and clusters of houses closer in. Everyone in the country seems to be moving to TX or FL. This is historically a boom or bust town, and we’re seeing it again…
But there is a frantic quality to it. People are in a big hurry to get done before the bad thing happens. IDK which bad thing they individually fear, but there is starting to be a sense of wrongness in the population, at least the parts I interact with. And I talk to everyone I can. Store clerks, construction company owners, workers, yard salers, hustlers, professionals, tradesmen, small business owners, other random people. Change is in the air. Not hopeful, good change either. More like dread, and trepidation. Everyone is nervous and unsure, but soldiering on as fast as they can.
—
8 buckets of rice is 2 dry cups a day for more than 2 years. Including the buckets, it’s about $400. Don’t wish you’d bought them, BUY THEM. You don’t have to get it all this week, but I wouldn’t wait too long. Everyone has room for 8 buckets. Throw a couple big bottles of multi-vitamin in the cart too.
Bob would talk a lot about “iron rations”, food that was enough to keep you alive, but not what you’d eat by choice. There are a lot of details in posts and comments tagged with the keywords on the right. Go and read the posts. But at a minimum, buy and store the rice. It will extend whatever else is available, and it’s the single simplest thing I can think of to recommend doing. Of course there is a lot more, and I urge anyone who hasn’t already to read the stuff at the keywords. Then ACT. It’s really cheap insurance.
That’s the baseline. Build from there. Stack it all.
nick
*”why are the drums going all night?” ” when the drumming stops, the guitar solo starts…”
75F and 93%RH this morning. Looks clear outside. Another fine summer day.
n
They aren’t trying until the Fed Funds Rate hits 16%. That’s where it was at when Volker took office, and the Fed wasn’t buying Treasuries then.
Volker raised it to 21% IIRC. PPI is worse now.
New, big houses out near the new HP Enterprise HQ are not meant for Americans.
I kid @Lynn about Sugar Land, etc. becoming “cheap” housing for the Tonymobile workers, but Austin is severely growth constrained. I’ve seen the plans to make 71 and I-10 into a continuous toll road from Austin’s airport area — where Musk set up shop — to Houston.
A bunch of changes are taking place to the roads around here to funnel workers from the new suburbs N-NW of town down to the Dell complex and Austin HPE campus. We have new stoplights in our neighborhood, and the major N-S road through the development is about to become an important thoroughfare.
Yet another drawback to the 50 comments/page limit: This morning I searched for but couldn’t find the comments in re Android safe mode on yesterday’s blog entry before realizing that I was only searching the second page of 79 comments. Once I remembered to switch back to the page containing the first 50 comments, voila!, there was the comment I was looking for.
@Rick H: Please sir, could we ditch this whole 50 comments/page thing?
Bring back Gravatars, too. My head is getting cold.
Bring back Gravatars, too. My head is getting cold.
Bring back Gravatars, too. My head is getting cold.
I concur.
Gah,, it really is lizard people…
https://www.zerohedge.com/military/ufo-hearing-pentagon-shows-declassified-footage-flying-spherical-object
n
@mediumwave:
Reposting a link to the actual comment with the howto
G.
Lizard people? Nah, it’s the usual crappy photography of distant…somethings. Could be anything from a camera artifact to a weather balloon. Holding a Congressional hearing? Congress ought to have more important things to do.
Election year. They’ll vote for money for the Ukraine fiasco, but that’s effectively a DoD contractor full employement act, supporting the McMansions and German grocery getters in the DC suburbs as well as a lot of Congressional districts, even those that are solid “red”.
Anything else? Fuggedaboudit.
The conspiracy theorist in me likes to believe that the reason there’s been these official discussions at the governmental level on the UFO topic lately is to get it out there, get it talked about (outside of the fringe groups that have traditionally obsessed over it), and plant that seed in the minds of the masses. So, when (not if) the aliens show up things are slightly less hysterical than they otherwise would be. Perhaps aliens have already made contact and the timeline our government established with the aliens for revealing themselves is coming to an end. It’s fun as hell to speculate about. 🙂
@chad, that is pretty much my belief, when I believe in it. Battlespace preparation. Moving the Overton window, etc.
And it hasn’t just been in the election years, there has been a lot of it lately.
n
Better that than making more laws or spending a lot more money.
I don’t believe we are alone in the universe. The distances are so great, however, that I find it hard to fathom ever making contact other than receiving some sort of transmission. Of course, that’s based on our current knowledge of how things work. We know a lot, but I think what we don’t know is order of magnitudes greater…
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10826793/New-poorly-understood-group-gender-questioning-youth-overwhelming-DR-ERICA-ANDERSON.html
There is actually some well reasoned and thoughtful commentary and discussion in this article.
My question, which the author hints at, is “what if these kids actually ARE different in some fundamental way?” If they are, then you have to ask “WHY? What caused the change?”
–said another way, this new cohort may simply be confused, and influenced by people with social or financial incentives to claim to be something with tremendous social benefit for them without understanding the real danger and damage to themselves.
JerryP used to say often that if you want more of something, reward it.
n
@mediumwave:
Reposting a link to the actual comment with the howto
G.
Thanks!
2022 HEADLINES: “SCIENTISTS GENE HACK HAMSTERS INTO HYPER-AGGRESSIVE MONSTERS.” While we might lose a cure for cancer, it might be time to shut down most of this gene hacking stuff (including “gain of function” crapola) permanently, by international treaty. If there’s one thing we have learned over the last few years, it’s that these “science uber alles” morons will discard all compunctions if they can make a few bucks.
As if there wasn’t already enough to worry about! 😉
Well, dang it. I was going to choose Hyper-aggressive Monster Hamsters for the monthly disaster pool for May but ended up going with Asteroid Impact in Rain Forest Releases Space Virus. Well, there’s still 12 days left for my prediction to hit and win me the pool.
Alex Jones knew all along: the water’s turning them gay.
Like the frogs.
N
They’re just “ proto gay ” according to the article.
N
I thought it was the grape Kool-Ade
I’ve been offline, traveling all day.
Good news: No damn masks required, anywhere. Not the airport, the shuttles, the planes.
Bad news: Travel still sucks, TSA security theater still sucks, and when they dropped me off at Avis to get my car, I waited 2 hours, that’s 120 minutes, to get the car I had reserved and paid for in advance. They were taking returns, washing them, and immediately giving them to us customers. I missed my chance to see friends at an open mic because of that. Admittedly, I was cutting it fine, but 2 hours?
I shared a row on Southwest with an active duty female sailor who talked about her USMC boyfriend, and a young lesbian (masked) who only spoke to me to ask why we were singing “Happy Birthday”. It was the flight attendants leading a celebration for 3-year-old Madison.
Sounds like Avis is having trouble getting new cars too.
How did you know that the masked young lady was a lesbian ?
The past couple of weeks, I have been trying various things to fix the timeout/slow site speed/500 errors.
I have monitored the site response times via the Developer’s Network tab in the browser. Page loads are usually around 4-7 seconds, but sometimes take longer. There is no consistent pattern to the delays.
I have looked at database query times. Most queries take about 1.5 seconds; sometimes more, sometimes less. This is a reasonable query time.
I’ve also looked at the queries to ensure they are efficient. There is one plugin that appears to duplicate an existing query. It should be using the query that is done by the ‘core’, not it’s own. (It is the comment ‘edit-after-posting’ plugin.) I have entered a support request with the plugin author, but they don’t seem to be too responsive. I considered removing the after-edit plugin, but you guys got all excitable about that the last time I tried that. So it stays (even though editing gives you raw HTML code; not sure why – which was another support request to the plugin author – who hasn’t responded to that one, either).
On the theory that the size of the comments table was causing some delays, I have tried several things.
First, I tried adding caching to the site. This caused other problems, most notably the loss of the ‘cookie’ used for your name/email. And, caching only really works well if the same page is accessed by many users. Not the case here, so that was removed.
Then I tried ‘paging’ the comments, on the theory that displaying less comments might be a more efficient query. It turns out you guys were irritated about that. And, as I then added the query stats plugin, the paging didn’t seem to make much difference. So, comment paging is gone (earlier today).
Another thought was the display of the avatars in comments. Each avatar displayed is a request to an external site, with the response needed before the entire page can load. That seemed to make a minor difference. Avatars may return later; I have some more troubleshooting involved.
Another issue seemed to be the search engines accessing old pages. I’ve been watching that for a while, and note that although the search engines are still active, there are only a max of 15-20 page requests per minute, which the site should be able to handle. So don’t think that is an issue.
I have also been working with the hosting support people. Since the slowness is very intermittent, it’s hard to catch and diagnose the errors. The hosting place had some DNS issues earlier this week, but that is not an issue (it has since resolved). Their email today indicated that not using ‘Fast-CGI’ in PHP 7.4 might help, so that has been changed.
They also offered to move the site to a lower-used server, in case other sites on the shared server might be causing the delay. That might happen, but it will take a bit to do that.
So, all of the above are things I have done over the past month+ to try to resolve issues with the site here. Since the problems are so intermittent, trying various things takes a while. And, some of the things that needed to be tried appeared to irritate some here – who seem to be ‘set in their ways’ for how things work here.
I am continuing to monitor the site – I watch it dozens of times each day, looking at response statistics and usage. This will get fixed, but it may (and has) caused some irritation with how things are working here. I apologize for that, but it is necessary.
Questionable Content: Yah is a Little Crazy
https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=4789
Being a fairly new independent AI with many android bodies, Yah is still figuring things out.
And 1% battery status is bad, real bad.
“Hostages to a Cult” By Erick Erickson
https://www.creators.com/read/erick-erickson
“This past week, the average price of a gallon of gasoline hit a record high in the United States. Some states are regularly seeing prices above five dollars for a gallon of gas. The country is now regularly experiencing an increase of over four dollars on average. In the same week gas hit records, the Biden administration canceled oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska. Internal documents show the administration is more focused on climate change than change in your pocket. Americans are held hostage to a cult of extremists.”
Another $40 billion to Ukraine.
Fcuk very much Cruz and Cornyn. I’m sure the $40 billion will really help. Defense contractors, that is.
@Rick H:
Then I tried ‘paging’ the comments, on the theory that displaying less comments might be a more efficient query. It turns out you guys were irritated about that. And, as I then added the query stats plugin, the paging didn’t seem to make much difference. So, comment paging is gone (earlier today).
Thank you!
So, all of the above are things I have done over the past month+ to try to resolve issues with the site here. Since the problems are so intermittent, trying various things takes a while. And, some of the things that needed to be tried appeared to irritate some here – who seem to be ‘set in their ways’ for how things work here.
I don’t consider myself to be a reactionary old fart resistant to change, and I seriously doubt that the others complaining about the changes think of themselves that way either. Sometimes a solution to a problem, even one made in good faith, turns out to be worse than the problem itself and needs to be rolled back.
In any event, your hard work is always appreciated.
“Texas A&M’s Jimbo Fisher rips Alabama’s Nick Saban to shreds after cheating accusations”
https://www.chron.com/sports/college/article/Jimbo-Fisher-Nick-Saban-Texas-AM-Alabama-cheating-17184128.php
“After the Crimson Tide coach said the Aggies ‘bought’ every player in their recruiting class, the Texas A&M coach called Saban ‘despicable’ and hinted at nefarious behavior in Saban’s past”
And here we go.
Probably from where she was wearing the mask.
Get that vision out of your head!
Let’s hear it for @Rick H!
Election year. They’ll vote for money for the Ukraine fiasco, but that’s effectively a DoD contractor full employement act, supporting the McMansions and German grocery getters in the DC suburbs as well as a lot of Congressional districts, even those that are solid “red”.
Anything else? Fuggedaboudit.
Apparently we have give all of our light weapons, all our crew served weapons, and all the ammo for those to Ukraine. Now we are giving our heavy weapons to Ukraine which I guess means our Mobile Howitzers and mobile missile batteries. We gotta replace all that stuff now.
The president of Raytheon says that they cannot make Stinger missiles using today’s technology so they have got to re-engineer the controls. I do know that EMP rated cpus costs are out of sight, thousands of dollars each, maybe a hundred K$ now. And it is not just the USA, it is the UK, Germany, France, etc. Essentially NATO has been stripped clean.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/26/raytheon-stinger-missile-stocks-delay-00027766
re: When the drums stop, the guitar solo begins.
When I first heard that joke, it was a bass solo. I thought that was funnier, but then I have heard guitar solos I actually like.
re: The masked lesbian (sounds like the title to something)
The young person, slim and in coordinated yellow slacks and blouse and jacket, sat next to me in the middle seat. He/She/It was in a short boy haircut, and at first I had no clue about this person’s sex. I actually avoided staring, because I generally don’t care. I actually noticed the mask more than anything else.
During the flight, she was reviewing photos on her phone, I presume of her recent trip. I am not capable of looking away from an electronic display that close in front of me. It’s a weakness.
One of the photos was of her on a beach in a bikini. Same person, same face, same haircut.
Another photo was of her proudly posing with a rainbow flag.
I don’t brag about my gaydar, but I’m fairly certain about this one.
..and their employees, suppliers, shareholders (including all those 401Ks and IRAs)…
I, Pencil
>> @Rick H: Please sir, could we ditch this whole 50 comments/page thing?
Just my 2 cents, let’s give Rick some time to figure out the current performance issues before the paging is finalized.
Speaking of bass solos, I do have a favorite solo by a bass player.
You have to listen closely to get the joke, though.
Johnny Heartsman – Paint My Mailbox Blue
Right on! Yep, er, um, wait a second…
Yeah, I work for a defense contractor. No offense taken here though. The amount of money thrown around is ludicrous.
“California’s ‘affordability crisis’ attracts innovative ratemaking and regulatory proposals”
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/californias-affordability-crisis-attracts-breakthrough-ratemaking-and-re/622593/
“Double-digit year-on-year spikes in electricity rates are leading California regulators and stakeholders to search for ways to protect climate goals and rate affordability.”
Innovative ratemaking scares the you know what out of me.
Oh Christmas tree, Oh Christmas Tree …
Meanwhile, on the “40 Acres”, the coach has been given his walking papers but will be allowed to walk the sidelines during the first few games of the season to make the dismissal look legit, “for cause”, and not another panic move by the UT alumni, who gave up 7-5, a decent bowl win, and one more season out of a proven pro-level QB in exchange for what happened last year.
Now the baseball coach is in trouble.
“It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids, without the knowledge of the individual, certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hard-core Commie works.”
74 seconds for this page to respond when I clicked the link, starting at 14:31 pm CDT.
Edit: then, less than 2 seconds to post, at 14:33. And, a similar fast edit.
Edit again @ 14:39 to add: Just read Rick’s post at 19 May 2022 at 14:19. Thank you for all your effort, Rick. We know you are not sitting on your hands, and we appreciate that you are as frustrated as we are! I figure I will try to remember to immediately post the time when I experience this, in case another tiny data point might be useful for troubleshooting. 🙂
How did you know that the masked young lady was a lesbian ?
Don’t worry they’ll tell you.
like this https://americasbestpics.com/picture/d6cC44U89
(or the new WH spokes dyke)
“Charles Nenner Warns “One Third Of Global Population Won’t Survive Next War Cycle””
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/charles-nenner-warns-one-third-global-population-wont-survive-next-war-cycle
Well that is gonna suck.
“Nenner advised to get out of both the bond and stock markets at the beginning of the year, and he was on target. Nenner predicts it’s going to get worse for stocks and bonds. Nenner says the next downside target is “15,000 on the DOW,” and it will eventually hit around “5,000 on the DOW.””
The market makers will head to their summer homes in the Hamptons soon. Their proteges won’t continue the crazy until they come back in September.
“Nenner also says he thinks oil will keep rising and will hit $150 per barrel, and it could eventually hit “$250” per barrel.”
Not if 1/3rd of the people on the planet die.
“Nenner says people who are getting a pension should expect big cuts in the future and also expect big inflation too. It will be the worst of both worlds.”
I wonder if that includes Social Security ?
“Microsoft says Windows 11 is now ready for broad deployment”
https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-says-windows-11-is-now-ready-for-broad-deployment/
Well, that takes care of abroad but what about the USA ?
Hat tip to:
https://www.codeproject.com/script/Mailouts/View.aspx?mlid=16525
Get off my lawn!
And up to a tenth of the world was predicted to die from the Chinese bioweapon.
I don’t think it’s fair to say people who don’t like some of the changes are “set in their ways”. Since I began reading here a year or two ago, Rick has made regular changes, and has rolled out at least one entire new theme in which everything changed.
Changes have included major changes to the sidebar displays and to the navigation, and to my memory those huge changes got lots of applause and no complaints. People reported things that genuinely needed tweaking, as is the case with any big site changes anywhere.
In fact, I’ve been genuinely impressed by how well this community has accepted the regular changes to appearance and functionality.
I understand what Rick is doing with the comments. But from an end user perspective, pagination of comments genuinely interferes with the actual flow of conversation, and the ability to read and respond quickly and easily all of the comments for the day. It’s the kind of change that could affect the character and amount of interaction.
This is a calm blog, and there are rarely more than 150 or so comments in any one day. Particularly since we don’t have photos on here messing things up, I don’t think it is inappropriate to ask for the full day to be available on one page.
Boeing will try again in about half an hour.
https://news.yahoo.com/watch-boeing-launch-starliner-spaceship-193417620.html
We are still on Windows 10 at the new job, and another division of the company supplies a big chunk of the corporate drone laptop market in the US.
Minus 10% for the big guy.
>> Apparently we have give all of our light weapons, all our crew served weapons, and all the ammo for those to Ukraine. Now we are giving our heavy weapons to Ukraine which I guess means our Mobile Howitzers and mobile missile batteries. We gotta replace all that stuff now.
Ahh, so that’s Putin’s plan all along…get all the NATO powers to empty their arsenals so Russia has sn upper hand amongst the world powers. And then what happens when China acts on Taiwan?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-19/china-warns-us-a-dangerous-situation-is-forming-over-taiwan
Well, at least it didn’t go all ‘splody.
The weather is definitely June in Florida.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=281lPNHNVPM
Not of 1/3rd of the people die…
-depends on the people doesn’t it. Things could actually improve . That was one of the themes in John Ringo-s maple syrup war books. After really harsh selection pressure the much reduced population exploded with productivity .
N
Met with an electrician. I need to talk with the electricity co-op next.
Staying the night here at the BOL.
Got the grass cut and shaved an hour off the time.
Beautiful cool night.
N
https://ricochet.com/1258469/final-dobbs-draft-also-overturns-entire-new-deal/
Moved the chicken coop so it’s a full 10’ from the lot line. Got a warning letter from the city Tuesday. A neighbor complained (curiously NOT the neighbor next to the coop). No big deal, I always intended to move it. I do wish whoever filed the official complaint had chosen to knock on our door instead, though.
Additionally we received an unsigned letter Wednesday complaining we didn’t fit in the character of the neighborhood because our semi-enclosed front porch was cluttered and I had tools and boxes visible. They’re not wrong. Work in progress as we balance the time requirements of unpacking, repairing damage from neglected maintenance, having a life, etc.
Again, all things I know need to be improved.
Sure wish they’d just knocked on the door, though.
I guess we’re officially ‘the bad neighbors’
~eye roll~
I feel for you. It’s really not the kind of feeling you like to have in your home.
I’m reminded of a house we looked at. The couple had two small children, and yet, the house was beyond pristine. Everything not only sparkled, but actually looked new and unused. I don’t want to know what kind of life you have to lead, to have a house like that. But that’s likely the kind of neighbor who complains about ordinary clutter.