Cool and humid, but getting warmer later in the day. Perfect weather in other words. REALLY nice.
Did my stuff yesterday. It involved driving across Houston to Baytown, or an hour drive with no traffic. Houston metro is big. Stopped by my favorite gub store. Business isn’t booming. You’d think it would be, but people don’t have a lot of extra money at the moment. I’m hearing that from every direction. And coincidentally, the guy I picked up from in Baytown said the same thing one of my hobby guys said about Texans selling off their cattle- they’re doing it as fast as they can. Buy beef while it’s here, ‘cuz there is going to be a shortage later. That is getting baked into the cake as we speak.
Today I’ve got stuff to do before heading out for a couple of weeks. Mainly I have to get my storage organized and get some shelves set up. I don’t think I can leave stuff in the foyer for 2 weeks while I’m not here… Then I’m meeting a guy about selling my forklift. After that, I’m doing a pickup on the way to the lake.
I should be at the lake all week. I might come home mid week if the work pauses for a day. There are reasons it might. Otherwise, I’ll be there. I’m taking my laptop, and doing normal (if somewhat thin) posts, but my access to news and commentary will be limited.
I’ll be working on getting stuff ready up there, y’all need to be working on getting your own stuff ready too.
Like stacking up the food. And the friends.
n
As long as you have competent admin who you can trust not to do something stupid or obsess about Hot Skillz and The Cloud.
I don’t recall SSH having a serious bug in the core protocol or in over 20 years. People is where the security breaks down anymore.
I swear I remember SolarWinds distributing a free-as-in-beer closed source SSH client on Windows which was popular at the tolling company because it was Kewl. I caught all kinds of cr*p for Putty on that job.
In retrospect, I gotta wonder.
I had a soft people skills class for the job yesterday. Three hours, led by a “consultant” who does nothing but travel the country giving these classes and probably evaluating participation/enthusiasm for the employers. The classes like that always miss that humans can be horrible.
I kept my mouth shut, however and just played along. Everyone’s motives are good and pure.
Oh, and at least the class was online. I can fake being interested with the camera off, citing my “network issues” as the reason for lack of video.
In person, for 3-4 hours, would have been much tougher. The pandemic has an upside.
Most of the meetings I attend are on teams. I’ve been to exactly one in person meeting since the pandemic started. I hope the trend continues.
I do have a weekly in person meeting with my guys. Unlike almost every other meeting I’ve ever been in, I always have an agenda and I keep it short. The purpose is to discuss ongoing and new issues so everyone knows what is going on. If it runs a half hour, it’s because we dive deeper into an issue. Usually though, I save that for another time with just the needed individuals. Most meetings are 15 minutes and done.
Contrast that with my 2nd level bosses weekly staff meeting, Almost always an hour with 5 minutes of useful content and 55 minutes of crap/banter/people saying um.
Oh, and thanks everyone for the kind words. Dogs truly are family, and often the most well behaved members at that…
‘nother rainy day here. Cold, at about 40F. I reckon this watery stuff is frozen, not all that much higher up. The dog goes absolutely nuts for snow. We took a couple of high altitude walks over the summer, and when he found a snow patch, he made a beeline for it, dug, rolled, and generally had a ball. Having it just outside the door, well, it doesn’t get better than that. If you’re a dog, anyway…
My cat has been fussing more the past few months, so I’m taking her in to the vet on Monday. Maybe it’s just age, maybe something is wrong – cat’s aren’t very interested in communicating things like that to their people. So he’ll check her over, run some blood work, change the oil, kick the tires, etc..
Oh frabjous joy. The people who classes like that are unwilling to learn. Everyone else is bored stiff. But the consultant probably earns good money, so I suppose that’s positive? Why companies waste the money, I don’t understand. Covid was good for something, forcing classes like that on line. At least you can doodle, or surf, or something, while being told the obvious.
@ITGuy1998: Yup, they surely are. Sorry for your loss…
Teams or Zoom, depending on how closely HR in your organization monitors things.
We are Zoom where I currently work, but I’ve worked at places that prefer Teams for the panopticon capabilities starting with the transcription service always running. Of course, I speak from experience when I say that the existence of transcripts cuts both ways.
I would like to dial back on daily calls, which seem to be a more common practice over the last two years.
Currently 73F and 54%RH in Houston, with nice sun and clear skies.
Slept a bit late, needed it.
When I was still with BigCorp, we had weekly team meetings by phone, because half of us were in the field. It was always a hassle to call in, but – if the call helps you do your job it’s worth it. Mainly we shared any issues we were having, to identify if they were unique to us, or product or engineering related. And because we had different backgrounds, one man’s problem was another’s “been there fixed that”. There was a lot of wasted time on the call, but still as little as possible, because half the participants were desperate to get back to their crews.
We didn’t use any spy tech that I could see, just a teleconference.
n
@ Jenny,
My current Boston Terrier is 3 ½ years now, I got him from breeder at 8 weeks. We get along very well and we are inseparable (he is sitting next to me on the couch as I type). Wife and I have had two for many years, but now that I am alone, I think that two would be too much.
Spicy time is coming. Sooner than you think.
n
TV commercial for the latest and greatest Apple Watch says it can now even tell me when I’m ovulating…umm, gee Tim, how inclusive…
I’m sure they can tell when you’re ‘shaking hands with the Pope’ too. There have already been stories of cheating boyfriends being caught when their fitness tracker shared their elevated heartrate, when they shouldn’t have had one….
n
@CowboyStu
I think that two would be too much.
Was joking. I wouldn’t inflict that many unknowns on someone I know -grin-
Too many unknowns for someone to handle that wasn’t actively in dog rescue or dog sports and prepared for chaos.
I think my niece has a foster situation sorted out for one dog. I learned a tiny bit of information about the second dog and have a couple folks working on getting a pic to help. Oldest sister is going to enlist local law enforcement to gain access to middle sisters home today to grab her belongings and car. Her initial plan was to go over and look for an unlocked door. I think I convinced her that was a dangerously bad plan (she’s here on a not US passport, with a not quite hostile dead partners sister around).
It’s hard for folks to understand that other folks can be horrible and will inflict evil on you for no good reason. That bad people aren’t rational, don’t fear legal repercussion. Will act first and damn the consequences. The end result for the innocent or trusting is rarely good.
@ Jenny,
I was not the least bit upset! No worries! I was just on the couch for an hour watching a NASCAR race with Mickey sleeping next to me.
Now my daughter, SIL and I are going for a lunch in Sunset Beach, but I’ll give him a treat just when I go and when I get back and he won’t hold it against me.
That’s the reason that “Be polite, be helpful, and have a plan to kill everyone you meet” is good advice.
Voice phone conversations are protected. The spy tech was in the VPN connection and email server.
When Big Corp ran NetClient and Global Network Services, offering public dial access with email accounts, they were prohibited by law from monitoring employee emails since they were an ISP. Selling the service to the Death Star had nothing to do with money — they wanted out of the ISP business.
The minute you activated NetClient, all Internet traffic went down the tunnel through Big Corp servers. *Anything* you browsed was cataloged.
You would be amazed at the things we saw people doing with company machines.
Well, I’ve had my second wuflu booster. This one was the Moderna bivalent variety, that targets original strain and the Omicron variant. No drama at all, all same previous shots. So far, not even a sore arm… Admittedly, it’s only been 3 hours, but this is a good start.
Be it noted here, this is my first Moderna shot, all the others have been Pfizer.
G.
As long as you have competent admin who you can trust not to do something stupid or obsess about Hot Skillz and The Cloud.
They administer 300,000 domains across thousands of servers. Maybe tens of thousands of servers. I have had a dedicated and managed server here for almost 20 years now.
https://www.pair.com/
They run a custom version of FreeBSD across all their servers that they have patched to their heart’s content. The nice thing about FreeBSD is that it is locked by default whereas Linux is open by default. And they regularly patch stuff all the time.
Well, I’ve had my second wuflu booster. This one was the Moderna bivalent variety, that targets original strain and the Omicron variant. No drama at all, all same previous shots. So far, not even a sore arm… Admittedly, it’s only been 3 hours, but this is a good start.
Be it noted here, this is my first Moderna shot, all the others have been Pfizer.
G.
Please let us know how it is after a week. One of my friends is a beta tester for Moderna and took it back in January ???. It put him in bed for a day and a half and then no problems.
I just finished watching Hocus Pocus 2 on Disney. It was ok, nothing near as good as the first movie. All new actors except the three sisters (Bette Midler, etc).
@lynn:
Will do.
G.
We have another golden retriever- Amelia. She’s an English Cream golden, so her color is white. She’s almost 4 months old and is very gentle.
We aren’t going to train her to the word “come”. We are going to use “come along Pond”. Sigh, now I miss the days when Doctor Who was good…
FreeBSD isn’t Hot Skillz. Someone is serious.
A lot of FreeBSD is in OS X. FreeBSD was the first to get a port of Apple’s Grand Central Dispatch threading technology.
Chewy.com has Hocus Pocus chew toys (or had) featuring all three sisters.
That’s a very mixed message. If we had a dog, I’d buy a set just for Bette Midler. Maybe Sarah Jessica Parker.
Kathy Najimy is off limits. Senora Peggy Hill has not substitute taught her last class En Espanol, but let’s hope the reboot has more of an edge than the new “Beavis and Butthead” movie.
BTW, the DS9 mini reunion on “Lower Decks” aired this week. Not something worth subscribing to Paramount Plus to see, but it was cool to know a writing staff was at work who really appreciates the Stage 8/9 era “Star Trek”. Plus Nana Visitor and Armin Shimerman are always welcome reprising their characters regardless of medium.
“New Zealand PM UN Address Calls for Global Censorship of Climate Skeptics”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/09/30/new-zealand-pm-un-address-calls-for-global-censorship-of-climate-skeptics/
First Published on JoNova; “… How do you tackle climate change if people do not believe it exists? …”. Apparently if you are a climate skeptic you are somehow similar to a terrorist radical who promotes mass murder, and part of an effort to “… cause chaos and reduce the ability of others to defend themselves …”.
They are equating Climate Skeptics with mass murderers. This needs to stop and stop right now.
They keep on telegraphing their opinion that they are special and view the rest of us as their serfs. Soon they will make themselves as royalty and be able to put their children in their place.
>> I’m sure they can tell when you’re ‘shaking hands with the Pope’ too.
That dang watch knows if I’m Catholic? Man those Apple boys are smart!
“Colder, Wetter Than Normal September Pushes German Gas Consumption +14.5%, Winter Gas Outage Looms!”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/09/30/colder-wetter-than-normal-september-pushes-german-gas-consumption-14-5-winter-gas-outage-looms/
Uh oh, we may have a strong winter in Europe and the USA. It has been unusually cool here in south Texas for the last few days. last evening, both the wife and I were regretting not taking sweatshirts for our daily dusk time walk. One of our walking friends was wearing a sweater, I congratulated her on her preparation.
Otherwise known as proof – proof! – that anthropogenic global warming is real.
In the eyes of our would-be masters, anyone who resists the globalists’ efforts to increase and consolidate power is worse than a terrorist. Terrorists, for the most part, acknowledge and accept a powerful central authority. They want to coopt the power for themselves or replace it with a theocracy but they generally don’t want to destroy the power base. Anti-warmenists (and anti-covidians and so on) want to decrease central power, a heresy which cannot be allowed to stand.
BTW, I like the first comment on the Europe forthcoming Ice age, “Fake news. The smart people told me years ago that winters were a thing of the past.”
It appears that, once again, The Mucky Duck on Captiva survived a direct hit from a hurricane.
https://storms.ngs.noaa.gov/storms/ian/index.html#19/26.52240/-82.19296
I often joke that is where you will find me when Y2038 hits the fan. There are worse places to be while civilization collapses, and the sunset shortly before the apocalypse should be spectacular.
It is one lucky duck.
Tried watching the third episode of the Rings of Power. We made it to the 10 minute mark before we turned it off.
We watched episode one of Andor last night and are now trying episode 2. It’s not unwatchable, but so far nothing special. We shall see.
Bah, didn’t get out the door to the BOL. Will go up tomorrow. Had too much to do before I had to leave…
so home tonight.
Guess I can get a few more things done before I leave.
n
D1 wants to watch Hocus Pocus 2. We loved the first one. I saw it in the theater with one of my buddy’s kids on my lap. Kid is out of college now…
n
You didn’t even make it to the introduction of the Hobbits they can’t call Hobbits for legal reasons?
The hardcore Tolkien fans have been entertainingly brutal on that program on YouTube.
Update: Oh, third episode, my bad. So you have seen the Hobbits they can’t call Hobbits for legal reasons.
Lenny Henry participating in the trashing of yet another franchise.
Lenny Henry participating in the trashing of yet another franchise.
–??? I generally like Lenny Henry, used to love Chef, and Bernard and the Genie has some great lines, plus, Rowan Atkinson…
n
It’s because you sprinkle rather than dunk. The watch knows based on water sensing. People that sweat a lot are considered Jehovah’s Witnesses.
ah, the “ quotes ” are important…
n
can’t find the clip online, involves a really seriously weird BBC show called “The League of Gentlemen” and onanism….
n
“Domesticating Dragons (1) (Build-A-Dragon Sequence)” by Dan Koboldt
https://www.amazon.com/Domesticating-Dragons-Build-Dragon-Sequence/dp/198212587X?tag=ttgnet-20/
Book number one of a two book science fiction fantasy series. I read the well printed and well bound MMPB published by Baen in 2021. The author is a genetic researcher at a leading children’s hospital and knows the lingo. I look forward to purchasing and reading the second book in MMPB.
The book starts in the near future, three years after the canine facial tumor disease killed off most of the dogs on Earth. The only dogs that survived the disease were breeding pairs rushed into deep quarantine.
Noah Parker is PhD postdoc working on a genome system simulator for predicting intelligence and aggressiveness from a genome. He is hired by the Reptilian Corporation, a company that makes designer dragons from the eggs to hatching. Reptilian is trying to make domesticated dragons that do not want to bite your head off the first minute they see you. Sounds like a perfect match !
The author has a website at:
http://dankoboldt.com/
My rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars (97 reviews)
Back of the line for you:
https://nypost.com/2022/10/01/vp-harris-slammed-for-saying-hurricane-ian-aid-will-be-based-on-equity/
One heartbeat away…
Just moving the overton window…
n
“More than 2.5M customers in Florida without power; parts of southwest grid must be rebuilt, says FPL”
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/more-than-25m-customers-in-florida-without-power-FPL/632948/
“Recovery efforts are underway but in some areas of the state, Florida Power & Light warned the grid cannot be repaired.”
That is what you say when entire subdivision lines have to be replaced. Not good.
I just filed my 2021 federal tax return. Finally ! 37 freaking pages. I did have until Oct 15.
We need to go to a freaking single page system. How much did you make, send in 10%.
Beege Welborn on HotAir
Sick yesterday. Rewatched original Ghostbusters (hilarious) and Monster Trucks. Back at it today.
Crossing fingers I think the dogs are sorted. Predictably the dead partners family made a fuss over removing my middle sisters car. Older sister wisely backed off before violence ensued. A little surprised. Would have been more typical for her to dig in heels and get dead or injured.
A bunch or running around with family today. Picked up a couple “Cozy Coop” infrared panels to replace the perfectly good heat lamp. Hen house is 4’ cube. Last winter the hens threw raves and smacked into the heat lamp a few times. I need a safer option. Heat lamps are fine IF you can keep them clean and prevent violent contact. I couldn’t keep the lamp safe from the hens and have no desire for a fire. Will see how the Cozy Coop panels work. ialsore eived supplies to make a new feeder, new waterer, that we will be able to refill from outside the chicken run. I think this will improve everyone’s quality of life. Last year chicken care was a real hassle.
Spent a happy hour tootling around Blaine’s Art Supply. Our 10 year old daughter knocked out some great drawings at a party last night. We wanted to encourage her efforts.
Quick Costco stop.
Family effort to clean up outdoor tool storage (dogs now have clearance to hunt mice), took out dead apple tree branches and some weed trees, refilled water barrel in rabbitry, cleaned rabbitry. I’ve been swamped and hadn’t mucked the rabbitry for two weeks. Took longer than usual because of the accumulation of waste. But not bad.
Costco chicken and a salad for dinner. Conversation and drawing around the dinner table.
These ARE the good old days.
Maybe I can sell spray cans of “Jenny’s Enthusiasm” on eBay 🙂
Definitely would buy!