Cool again, hopefully not wet. National forecast has Houston outside any big storms for the next couple of days. That would be best for me and my Halloween plans…
Since my decorations are mainly made from cardboard and baling wire. Although I’m a bit short on baling wire this year. Couldn’t find my stash. I’m reduced to using string. Ok, it is EXPENSIVE special black theatrical string, but still… the cardboard tubes are a bit… squishy.
Didn’t get much done yesterday but auction stuff. Went grocery shopping at the local HEB. No lard at all on the shelf. Some other gaps, but there was finally peanut butter. No pumpkin pie either. The closeout shelf had a bunch of LED lightbulbs, and I needed some for one of my ceiling fans. Very fortuitous. Saved $44 on my bill between a couple of coupons and the clearance markdowns.
One observation… as I drove up to the store a guy crossed the lot in front of me. Older guy. Tactical pants. Outdoors shirt. Fanny pack that couldn’t be anything other than a pistol holster. Dude was like a neon sign. Don’t be that guy. If you are rocking a full size 1911 on one hip, wearing a ‘shoot me first’ photographer’s vest, with a mag or two weighting down the left side pocket*, you are not the grey man. You are a mobile resupply pod for the bad guys.
Grey man means fitting in. If that means dirty carhart jacket and jeans, or bright safety yellow t shirt and work boots, or a three piece suit and silk tie, or just a logo’d polo shirt and khaki slacks and a computer bag, look around and figure out what fits with your environment now, and wherever you need to go. Practice flipping that on its head too, and keep your eyes open for the thing or person that doesn’t fit. That person could be a threat or an ally, or a distraction, or a victim. You may want a variety of clothes and jackets, or hats, to better fit in if you have to go someplace where you might otherwise stand out. You should be able to dress up or down as needed too. You don’t want to be looking like ‘money’ when everyone around you is broke and hungry.
A long time ago, and a lifetime away, a friend and I had to appear in court. Young white kids from the suburbs, we dressed up. Jackets, maybe even a suit. We were the best dressed people in the courthouse. Sketchy felons kept asking us for legal advice. We did NOT fit in. In retrospect we must have looked like very junior lawyers. We were able to order drinks in a restaurant later that day without getting carded, so there was that 🙂 but otherwise it was a fail.
Your clothes are a costume. Make sure they are appropriate for your role.
Stack some clothes in different styles, and for different needs. Different sizes too. Make sure your more vulnerable family members have stuff they can wear to minimize their vulnerability. No little black dress for foraging amongst the rubble of civilization…
Today should be my big push to get most of my decorations up and the rest ready for Halloween itself. Some stuff is more delicate or desirable, so it stays safe until the actual night. I need to get all the lighting sorted out too, and decide if I’m doing any special effects like fog or projection. Last night to test, before the show!
Hope the weather stays nice.
Stack what you can. Learn what you can. Practice your skills.
nick
* this description is of a guy I saw a couple of years ago at Costco. Not a grey man.
Sam’s Club run yesterday, including Halloween candy.
The store was all out of Halloween themed Hershey miniatures, but they had plenty of bags of “Winter Holiday” themed miniatures on the next aisle over.
Ok. Happy Holidays, kids!
$21 for the bag. We’ll mix in some unthemed Hershey Kisses.
The candy manufacturers tried to perpetuate a shortage myth for Halloween this year, but Sam’s had plenty of candy as long as you weren’t picky about the theming.
Too risky. Too high profile.
Yeah, that’s the city where the sainted Harvey Milk faked claims about being dishonorably discharged from the Navy over his sexuality for political gain, but Pelosi is the husband of the first female Speaker of the House, not a city level politician.
Plus, the D’Alesandro political machine in Baltimore would have thoroughly researched the husband’s background back in the day, and made him disappear if they caught any hints bout potentially embarrassing behavior.
Paul Pelosi was acquitted of vehicular manslaughter over the death of his brother (!) before being sent to Georgetown for undergrad, and, depending on when Nancy brought him home, the machine was either facing an uphill reelection fight or freshly turned out from the Mayor’s office. The future husband would have been thoroughly investigated.
If Pelosi indulges those proclivities, it is a strictly high end operation. Go back and look at the kitchen appliances in the “ice cream” video. Just one of those refrigerators is worth more than the bus where the suspect purportedly lived.
Heck, my $400 refrigerator is probably worth more than that bus.
Last time I had a ticket, 5 sets of numbers, not a single one of my numbers were drawn.
For those of you not hip to the Pelosi husband’s previous achievement in the realm of vehicular stupidity.
https://nypost.com/2022/05/31/nancy-pelosis-husband-killed-his-brother-in-1957-car-crash/
Pinch Sulzberger’s brood allowed mention of the incident to appear in the Times as background for the DUI arrest earlier this year, but that article is behind the paywall.
53 F on the wild west side of the Brazos River. Nothing in the sky, clouds or sun. We need to fall back soon so the kids are not walking to school in the dark.
My Aggies lost again last night but my Astros won. My Aggies started the backup quarterback to the backup quarterback, a freshman. He did ok, could have been way worse. The kid has an arm on him and will be the starter next year when he has more one on one time with Jimbo.
Yeah, Qualcomm is increasingly bitter and in serious trouble, but if their allegations are true, Arm is not the future.
‘If Arm were to get rid of tech licensing as described by Qualcomm, it would give rise to RISC-V use, something Arm “should be worried about,” Gold said.’
Indeed. Think Apple doesn’t have Mac OS X running on RISC-V or AMD Threadripper in a lab somewhere? All it takes is a recompile.
https://www.fierceelectronics.com/sensors/arm-qualcomm-legal-battle-suggests-oems-need-arm-ip-licenses-not-chip-firms
And don’t bet against Chipzilla pulling something out of a lab “in the desert” like Core, breathing fresh life into x86-64.
I doubt Qualcomm is operating in a vacuum. I smell Redmond’s involvement.
I am going to Sam’s Club today to see if they have more Mach Three razors in stock. I tried that for the first time and like it. Noticeably better shave than the double blade razor. I cut my van dyke down to a four Friday as the long curly hairs where bothering me.
Chipzilla better have something out there. People are starting to notice that Intel chips are heaters. Even the entry level chips are 40+ watts, the I9 chips are 250 watts. Arm chips are ¼ those energy rates.
That is the real reason I am porting my software to C++ from F77. I sense a major Windows platform change coming on the distant horizon.
High energy prices are here to stay for a while. Maybe permanent.
There is a ball of fire in the sky now !
In a word, Klinton. Maybe not as Richie Rich, but in the Oval Office, really?
I have an I9, top of the line a year ago. Water cooled. There is a lot of heat coming from the radiators at the top of the cage. Really noticeable when I peg all the cores at 100% for 10 minutes while batch processing pictures.
Water cooler runs a speed based on temperature. Never had the system kick into high gear. The CPU remains at about 95C the entire time so the cooling system is working. Moving a lot of heat away from the CPU and out of the case.
@Alan: Thanks!
Getting the back end running on RHEL as part of that effort wouldn’t be a terrible idea unless your back end is tied to COM and Excel or other Microsoft tech.
In the short run, I think it is just a matter of time before Redmond announces their own Docker clone similar to Podman on various Red Hat Linux flavors, embedding the tech so that developers can rely on it being there “out of the box”. Docker itself has proven that the Linux container concept can run on Windows via WSL.
Bubba was a known quantity around The South for at least a decade before he decided to run for President. Plus, he didn’t violate the Old South politician’s rule — “Don’t get caught with a dead girl or a live boy.”
And Monica had a filthy rich doctor daddy who was also a major Dem campaign donor, hence the White House internship.
That never would have come to light if she hadn’t kept the dress. And there were consequences – Clinton lost his law license, something even Richard Nixon avoided.
Tell me that BJ wouldn’t want to be lecturing law right now to gullible agenda believing rich girl students at NYU.
(Don’t tell me they’re the best and brightest — Letterman’s mistress got an admission to NYU Law through CBS as part of her settlement.)
Or even Tulane, where Carville has been banished by the Dems.
65F and rising, with a clear sky and sun. Nice chilly start to the day.
I am no longer alone with my gay tryst theory. Lots of murmurs out there this morning. The long time elites just don’t care about getting caught as they think they are above the law. His taste for slumming it with random drug addicts might have been a liability back in the day, but it would get him fete’d on talk shows now. Only thing holding that back is how NANCY thinks she’d be perceived.
Last night I learned that even in my mid 50s, I’m still capable of playing the “just one more chapter, then bed” game with myself…. hard to fault D1 for the same weakness.
n
Sam Ehlinger doing well in his first NFL start today could have ramifications in College Station as well as on The 40 Acres. Pay attention to the Colts score.
The last pro-level quarterback Jimbo developed was Jameis Winston. Lovie can tell you how well that worked out for him.
$90 million is too much money to fire Jimbo this year, but Tom Herman is available and would probably work cheap as an assistant.
Lead off story at DM…
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11370729/Elon-Musk-shares-tweet-suggesting-Paul-Pelosis-attacker-GAY-PROSTITUTE.html
If there’s any truth to it, maybe there is enough light shining to show it…
n
Photos of the alleged broken back entry door seem to show the bulk of the glass on the OUTSIDE of the door.
We know that initial reports are almost always wrong, but there are a lot of discrepancies and unasked questions in the reporting that suggest something is NOT right with the story.
n
If a body cam or dispatch tape caught “RP” saying that the suspect was “a friend” and the voice clearly belongs to Pelosi then there is no excuse for what the media and politicians did in trying to hang the incident around the neck of Republicans.
In the broader picture, if his proclivities towards getting his strange on were well known around San Francisco, that’s incredibly compromising for the Speaker’s office.
Just gay or bi? Meh. I’m sure services exist in San Francisco to match him with someone young, attractive, and from a good home but just desperate enough to get involved with an 80 year old. The Governor probably has a few in his rolodex.
SFPD knows but pensions are at stake.
I’ve told the story before that while living in Vantucky, after selling our house in FL, we got hit up by my wife’s practice supervisor, the sister of an SFPD detective, who wanted us to use our equity to help her buy into the same retirement community as her sibling on a private island off the coast of Honduras, $50k minimum, but the sister had a bigger buy in according to what my wife told me later.
That’s when my eyes were opened about where the loyalties will lie with the cops in a SHTF situation, particularly if they work for an insolvent city.
Of course, lest anyone think that’s confined to California, the corporate entities known as the City of Dallas and City of Houston are technically insolvent due to first responder pensions. And the last time I checked, Dereck Chauvin still had his retirement condo in Tiger Woods old neighborhood outside Orlando despite losing his job with Minneapolis PD and going to prison.
BTW, we passed on the “opportunity”, but not after I endured the evening of ball breaking.
It’s official, Both Pelosi’s got hammered this weekend.
Interesting phrasing.
The jokes write themselves with the Pelosi’s.
Unfotunately so do the conspiracy theories since it is such a cliche.
“Aftershocks (The Palladium Wars)” by Marko Kloos
https://www.amazon.com/Aftershocks-Palladium-Wars-Marko-Kloos/dp/1542043530?tag=ttgnet-20/
Book number one of a three book military science fiction series. I read the well printed and well bound trade paperback published by 47North in 2021. I have ordered books two and three in the series from Amazon. I suspect that there will be more books in the series as there are eight books in his Frontlines series.
The Gretians lost the system wide war to the Alliance, the Rhodians, the Palladians, the Oceanans, the Acherons, and the Hadeans of the Gaia system several years ago. With a half million dead and trillions of ags expended, feelings still run high even though it has been almost two decades since the armistice. And the fifteen percent of Gretia GDP being paid as war reparations is breeding continual resentment against the Alliance.
The author has a website at:
https://www.markokloos.com/
My rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.3 out of 5 stars (3,914 reviews)
Why did I suddenly have a picture in my head of a toddler throwing a tantrum in the store? No matter.
Son was home for the weekend. We carved pumpkins and watched The Great Pumpkin. His girlfriend joined us. She hadn’t carved a pumpkin since she was a kid – some parents really do suck. She had a good time, and it was nice to get to know her a little bit better.
So, Russia isn’t alliwing Ukraine to export grain. Um…how?
I was looking at a map, and the Black Sea is bordered by a lot of NATO, and the straights are entirely NATO.
We’re talking serious world hunger problems here. Just what would be the problem with NATO ships providing a safe corridor from Odessa out of the Black Sea?
Anyway, Putin calling a Ukrainian attack on military ships a “terrorist” act – when those ships have been bombarding civilian targets? He is…deranged.
Only a brief mention of the cheating -er- academic dishonesty.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2022/10/SIGCSE_23__CS_instructor_pain_points.pdf
I think I’ve done about as much structure for the pirate ghost ship as I’m going to. Time to figure out how to suspend the skeletons in place.
And maybe install some more decor in the rest of the yard. It will definitely be more focused than last year.
n
All of the Halloween decor is gone from Home Depot and Lowes today, replaced with Christmas items.
I needed something to keep kids from tripping on the corner of our front walk where the front live oak has lifted the concrete above the level of the driveway. Last year, I put a janitor’s “caution” sign over the spot, but we didn’t have anyone ring the bell.
IIRC there was an article pointing out that the Uke grain was only going to Russia and allies anyway.
“weaponizing food”
WRT the ‘drone’ attack on the Russian ships… this might be of interest. If we’ve got ’em, others likely do too.
Boeing to install sensors and weapons aboard Orca large unmanned underwater vehicles
https://digital.militaryaerospace.com/militaryaerospace/202209/MobilePagedReplica.action?pm=2&folio=38#pg41
n
How much grain is actually being harvested and shipped out right now?
I imagine that “Longshoreman, Port of Odessa” involves pretty high life insurance premiums right now if the shipping company covers that benefit.
I can’t imagine those for “Combine Driver, Ukraine” are any less pricey.
The Aflac Duck flew the coop months ago. That is one tight fisted critter, right up there with The Gecko.
Do we really want to risk a nuclear war over Ukraine?
ITGuy1998 and Alan, thanks for the reference to https://www.diodedynamics.com/. I will add it to my trove.
I do some driving under extreme conditions: unlighted two lane highways with oncoming traffic. This usually means using good low beams, which are almost nonexistent on many US-spec cars up to just a few model years ago. When there is no oncoming traffic, good high beams are handy, and the same comment goes for cars up to just a few years ago. For people who drive in urban environments, stock lights are good enough, and maybe not worth the expense of modifications.
I have been modifying front lighting on cars since the 1960s. Most of my experience is with 5.75” and 7” round headlights, both sealed beam and halogen, so does not apply to modern cars. I have found older Cibie lights to be the best for my needs, with Hella second best. There are several models of each, but all are moot with the “aerodynamic” lights in vogue since the 1980s.
For these, there are two practical choices: better halogen bulbs, or complete fixture replacement. Complete replacement is risky, because many aftermarket housings don’t perform any better than the stock units – you are often buying blind, or trusting flaky “reviews.” Also, some require body modifications, for serious folks only. That leaves better bulbs.
Here is a dated, but very good, basic site on lighting:
http://www.danielsternlighting.com/home.html
Unfortunately, much of the good stuff is now gone, but it is still worth a few minutes of your time. Start here:
http://www.danielsternlighting.com/tech/bulbs/bulbs.html.
You will learn why you should avoid LED or HID “conversions” for light fixtures originally designed for halogen bulbs. There are also some good halogen bulbs worth trying. Note: I have not tried better bulbs for modern cars, but will one of these days.
I will note that there seem to be some new LED conversions that have small-appearing sources, and these might be much better optically than the older units with arrays of LEDs. Here is an example:
https://www.headlightrevolution.com/better_lighting_led/low_high_fogs I have not tried these.
Finally, consider auxiliary lights. The first is high beam augmentation, for those times when there is no oncoming traffic. Some LED kits throw a lot of light at low power consumption, but tend to spray it in a broad beam. They are easy to add and connect. The second is low beam augmentation. The best example I have actually seen in use is the Dodge Super-Lite:
https://www.hagerty.com/media/maintenance-and-tech/space-age-dodge-super-lite/
Duplicating the Super-Lite would be a more difficult project, because most available LED lights would need to have shields added. This could be easier if the car has a horizontal slot that is deep enough to accommodate a louver shield. This is something I might actually try.
Back in the old days, we could just slap on some Cibie or Hella lights. Now it is much harder. Some new cars have improved lights, but most don’t. Many of them produce excessive glare to oncoming traffic. Our US lighting standards are a mess. The only good thing I can say is that if you install something illegal, you are very unlikely to be ticketed for it: if yours is well engineered, it will not stand out among some of the crazy mods I have seen running around. Enforcement is lax, at least here in CA.
Yes, “cheat” appears only once and “honest” twice. The paper spends much more time discussing instructors’ concerns about “diversity”. And note that all of the cited instructors are in favor of it; there’s not a word about “diversity” slowing down the class or using up resources which might have been put to better use by more capable students. The words “merit” and “ability” do not appear in context of student admission or graduation, nor any synonym that I could think of.
But set that aside. The entire paper proceeds from what I view as a false assumption.
Call me an elitist, but I’m pretty sure that the programmer headcount could be reduced by 80%. Have one high-level programmer (top 10% by ability under the old headcount) and one lumpen to take care of some of the simpler tasks. (Reduce management by 90%, too.) Boom, shortage solved. The top-level programmers will be largely self-taught and OJT and won’t need a class on data structures or whatever. Formal education may help fill out their knowledge base, but I’m not sure that a classroom will accomplish any more than a topic list and reading list would.
Even if we keep university CS programs for training the people who will become corporate programmers, I dispute that the professors are the best people to be making the educational materials.
What’s this about Stroustrup at TAMU?
From what I’ve heard from co-workers who were there during his tenure as department chair, both Stroustrup’s lectures and his failed attempt to create a textbook follow up to his other C++ book would have been funny if it weren’t for the amount of wasted tuition money involved.
I’m sure that Death Star logo on the copyright notice page of his first book still grates.
These days Bjarne is torturing students at Columbia. God help them.
It looks like someone published the textbook attempt. Two editions!
>> Do we really want to risk a nuclear war over Ukraine?
Who exactly is deciding?
You’re an elitist.
So am I. I walked into my first programming job, I was given the hardest problems, and I noticed that at least half the programmers needed help with programming. I needed help with the business problems and formal accounting training.
The next 2 jobs I was clearly the only one who actually understood the entire system. By that point, it was all of the system stuff, plus all the accounting stuff: GL, AP, AR, Payroll, Inventory.
Then I got hired by DEC and got humbled. I’d say fully half were as good as me, and as aware, and the majority of the rest pulled their weight. And at DEC I had direct access via Notes to all of the East coast product developers, who were some really extra bright guys. After DEC, I went to a much smaller company that had even a higher percentage of heavy hitters. DoD layoffs (and traumatic family issues) forced me to change my path.
My tech career ends there. For the last 15 years I’ve been doing SQL and DBA and focusing on healthcare reporting. Some SSIS and various presentation tools and lots of data interchange. I was last in a group of about 30 people, and I’d say 25 of them needed to be led by the hand. How to use tools, what tools to use, how to determine what the issues were, how to solve the issues, what’s important, what’s frivolous… These were all mysteries to them.
Coincidentally, (or not), most of those people were not born in the US, didn’t speak English as a first language, and most had darker skin tones. They were also the ones most often promoted to manager positions. Which led to more communication issues and culture clash.
I will disagree on the value of good CS instruction, but only partly. The problem with self-taught and OJT training is that you’re often building the house without a solid foundation (theory and analysis). A good team needs savants, but it needs people with good systems training and an understanding that goes beyond memorizing a few patterns and knowing the latest buzzwords.
My 2 cents.
I got by being self taught and having the ability to grasp object-oriented principles for nearly 20 years, but, getting past the late 00s, I started to encounter interviews where some pinhead would want to talk about O notation or the implementing the deterministic finite automata behind the grep ‘*’ pattern, and I never had any exposure so I set out to correct the gaps.
Of course, now, after I filled in the gaps, ACM is debating dropping classes based on Sipser (the deterministic finite automata) and CLRS (O notation) texts as being “too hard”.
Have never been in it other than a gift ticket about 30 years ago in CA. But just after I read this I got a call saying I had won the 20v DeWalt drill I filled out the card for at the Home and Garden show. It was just delivered to my door.
12V Diesel Heaters: A couple weeks ago I said I’d report on what I found with ours.*
Bottom line: It makes heat, enough for an RV. It draws little power.
The model that we got** had a useless manual, which described the LCD control panel and the remote in exacting (but not quite right detail) but didn’t say a word about assembly, installation, safety considerations, current requirements, or anything useful like that.
Assembly was easy enough because each pipe (burner intake, exhaust output, and hot air) fit in only one place. I should say that assembly was straightforward. It wasn’t really easy because of what I’ll call poor layout. I connected the power lines to my car battery with jumper cables – they were just 14 gauge wire with bare ends, obviously intended to be wired into the boat or RV’s system. For today’s purpose, gripping the wire tips in the teeth of the jumper cables worked well enough.
After I screwed around with the thing for a while (most of the time spent trying to read the LCD screen, which has only a very dim backlight, not enough to read when the unit was outdoors), it started putting out warm air. Warm, not hot. The exhaust pipe got pretty hot, as expected. The unit was very quiet in operation, with the fan making the only real noise, a bit noisier than a computer.
Because I plan to use this if the electricity goes out in a Winter storm, I’ll put a “cigarette lighter” adapter on the power wires, to plug into one of the lithium ion battery boxes we have. I’ll make an insulated insert to run the exhaust out a window. (Nothing fancy, just a board the width of the window and a few inches high, with a heat-proof thing for the pipe to pass through. Put a towel at the top of the windowpane to keep cold air from coming in and call it good enough.) This certainly won’t keep the house warm but should extend the time until the pipes in the cellar freeze, plus people can sit in the cellar with the warm air blowing on them. Three battery boxes and two gallons of fuel plus a half gallon in the heater’s tank should get us through a normal lines-down power outage.
* I’ve been very busy with One Damned Thing After Another ™ and might not have been able to get to it before today, but the real delay was that I kept forgetting to buy a couple dollars’ worth of diesel. Been driving around with the can in the back of the van and herp derp driving right past a gas station a couple times per week.
** The one we got is no longer listed, at least not with the same URL, or I’d provide a link. There are half a dozen or more virtually identical, from a variety of distributors with Chinese names. Which you choose probably doesn’t matter, as I suspect that only one company makes those that I saw and then a bunch of companies slap on their logo decals. We’re not talking rocket science here***: all it really needs is a combustion chamber, a plenum to heat air, and a fan to push air through.
*** Well, we kind of are. Jet science, anyway.
I’ve never bought myself a lottery ticket. I bought a handful of scratchoff cards once to give as door prizes for a business party and I occasionally let my wife buy a ticket when we walked to the convenience store* to get milk and eggs. She got the ticket “for the baby”, but the single time that the ticket got anything, $2 or thereabouts, my wife kept the winnings and didn’t give them to the baby.
My wife has bought lottery tickets a couple times per month for the past ten years or so. Some of her former coworkers regularly pooled their money to buy tickets and she joined. One week she didn’t have any cash so didn’t join that week, and they won $400M. Even after (punitive) taxes and split however many ways, it was enough for them to retire, which they did en masse. She’s been kicking herself ever since, and buying lottery tickets ever since … which marks her as the perfect mark from a lottery marketing standpoint.
* Back at the old house, which had a convenience store and a bus stop a half mile away. The current house is less convenient, with the nearest store and stop a mile and a half away, half of that distance being a hilly, curvy road with no lights and no shoulders, rated for 30MPH but with drivers typically going 40.
I haven’t been curious enough to check. Not sold clean, though. Quit claim deed to the wife. Then sold. Still weird looking.
Well, I’ve got a ghost pirate shipwreck in my front yard. Need to dress it out, and tweak the lighting tomorrow. I did throw up some lights for tonight. Lots of chat with neighbors, some from other streets, so it’s doing one of the things I wanted it to do.
Did get a couple of other things up too. Next door neighbor did a very fun and tasteful display after seeing mine. I’m glad that others on the block are decorating too. It’s more fun that way.
We didn’t do any ‘trunk or treat’s this year. I kinda miss it. It’s a great way to get together with friends and neighbors and fun to dress up the car.
Meatspace baby!
n
I usually buy two lottery tickets each grocery trip. One for the Texas MegaMillions, one for the “Texas Two Step” (fewer numbers, smaller payout, but better odds.) Didn’t buy a Powerball, don’t usually since they went to $2.
Haven’t won much, less than $40 total for the whole time.
n
You may be the only regular purchaser of lottery tickets who doesn’t think that, all in all, he’s made more than he’s spent. I don’t know how many coworkers and other acquaintances I’ve heard talk about the $50 they won two years ago, and that clearly covers the $2 or $10/week they’ve been spending for five years.
In my discussion of the 12V Diesel heater, above, I made a typo. The power lines are about 24 gauge, not 14 gauge. Barely thicker than the leads in a USB charging cable. The unit draws very little power, just enough for the fans (small one for the combustion air intake, bigger one for the heated air flow), the computerized control, and the ignition.
The odds of winning are, well, astronomical. What I have ciphered is that the odds climb even higher without a ticket. I have
spentwasted about $60 over the years. I have won $4. I have no delusions of it being a profitable encounter. Mmmmmeeeeeehhhhh. I waste more money on Doritos.Lots of denial about state lotteries.
In Florida, a significant part of the revenue stream goes to fund Bright Futures, the college scholarship program. I have friends who belittle the FL Lottery as a “tax on the stupid” and then go on to talk about how they were thankful their kid managed to keep their grades high enough to receive Bright Futures for another semester.
$18.39 with tax for the 50 count box of 1 oz bags. Not cheap.
Sam’s Club run yesterday.
HEB has some private label imitation chips which aren’t bad, but they aren’t much cheaper.
Chicken drumsticks were down slightly to $1.28/lb from $1.39/lb.
>> One for the Texas MegaMillion
Is this different from the multi-state MegaMillions, which went to $2 some time ago?
@SteveF: Thanks for the review of the little diesel heater. Sounds like a decent backup or garage heater.
The wire gauge seems small. Does it use a glow plug for ignition?
And is it on/off or does it use a thermostat?
>> $18.39 with tax for the 50 count box of 1 oz bags. Not cheap
$0.37 for the used to be 25 cents bag.
I bought CA Lotto tickets off and on for 23 years, according to a spreadsheet I keep. At the beginning, I was able to buy a package that automatically bought one $1 ticket in each draw for a maximum of 52 draws, or six months. They stopped that, and changed to a max of 8 draws, and later to 20 draws. I won 14.95% of my cost.
Over the years, they changed the schemes and added a big bunch of options, but I stuck with the one big drawing. I noticed that my paltry winnings steadily declined, so I quit two years ago. One thing I have observed is that the probability of winning a big prize is about the same whether or not I buy a ticket, but of course I can’t win anything if I don’t buy a ticket. I am going to call this Furlong’s Law.
One thing I did was to pick numbers that were all above 31. A UCLA professor compiled a couple years of published winning numbers, and determined that the probability of splitting winnings goes up if one picks numbers less than 32. The reason is that a lot of people use dates to pick numbers.
When I was a kid, there were numerous fund raising lotteries or sweepstakes, usually by churches or clubs. My father would always buy a dollar’s worth of tickets. He never won a first prize, but often won second or lower. I doubt he kept track, but he won a lot of stuff, and it was for genuine charity. His biggest prize was a hundred pounds in the Irish Sweepstakes, considerable money back then.
My wife is a generous person. She also does a lot of volunteering. One thing she has done over the years is to buy tickets for fundraisers, often a dinner. She will buy for a group, and get reimbursed by the other couples. One year, every other couple won a prize except us; the biggest prize was a cruise. There were a lot of prizes, but… After that, she seemed to start winning some prizes for us, usually not the big prize.
Our church holds an annual fundraiser dinner with entertainment; it has always been a big social event. They sell only 200 tickets for something like $200 each. The big prize used to be a car, but about ten years ago they changed to $10k because cars became too expensive. The first year we went, we split a ticket with another couple. We shared the third prize of $1k. I suggested we quit, since we were obviously ahead, but of course… Yeah, charity.
We went to Las Vegas many years ago with another couple. They liked the entertainment, but they would split one roll of quarters to play in the slots. Seemed stupid to me. Then they said we should play the million dollar slot at Caesar’s Palace. It was a huge thing, big enough for a person to sit inside. My wife put a silver dollar in and won $10. She wanted to walk away, but our friends insisted she should play it out. Why not? She did, for what seemed quite a while. I almost believed there was a psychologist inside. Eventually, she of course lost the last dollar. A good run for a buck.
I try to only support charities I respect. The CA Lotto was an exception. I don’t gamble. That implies I expect to win something, but I expect to lose. If I win something, I am very happy. No matter how much it costs.
>> The odds of winning are, well, astronomical.
History tells us that sooner or later some shlub will win these extreme jackpots and if being that shlub costs me $4 a week for a few weeks, si be it. I’ll take those odds.
The thing about the lotto is that EVENTUALLY someone wins. There is a guarantee that someone WILL win. Someone is going to be that someone, and the cost for me to participate is small vs the potential life changing reward.
“Never tell me the odds.” – Han Solo
I’ve had stuff happen to me that is so far out there, winning the lotto would seem pedestrian. So I play.
n
Chips. I like the greasy salty Lays original. HEB used to have them for $2.50 a bag if you bought two. Then they doubled the price. Now the price is $5.89 per bag, MORE than double. This week and last they had a coupon deal, buy two and get $3 back. It’s not back to where it was, but it’s close enough with the other inflation that I was willing to buy them again.
I’ll eat chicharrones instead at $1.50 a bag, or even the HEB brand of chips which always tastes burnt to me before I pay almost $6/bag.
n
I saw gas up at $6/gal here in the Ca. High desert this morning, while shopping.
I suppose that means $7 by Thanksgiving? We never dropped below $5.40 this summer AFAIK.
Ah well. I’m retired, but I cringe thinking of what my 3000 miles a-month driving would cost today.
EdH, gasoline here is 5.399, starting a week ago. Before that, it was $6 or so. For decades, we were high; for the last couple years, we have been lower than Costco Lancaster and about the same as Costco Rancho Cucamonga. Everywhere outside our valley for a hundred mile radius is higher. I would celebrate, but I see a continued march higher starting Nov 9. We will vote accordingly.
Pearls Before Swine: Hello, Doc Ness
https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2022/10/30
Somewhere, Paul Simon is screaming.
I just released JimB’s comment from ‘too many links’ moderation. It’s about headlights, and is upthread at about 18:30.
As I understand it, the reason US car headlights produce so much ‘glare’ for oncoming drivers is that US highways are/were unlit, and subsequently car makers were required to design headlights that would shine UP enough to illuminate overhead signage. Just one of the many many regs for cars that drive up the cost, or harm the driving experience.
And one more example of an exercise I call “what’s not there anymore?” when I go looking for the reasons things are the way they are now. Why the jog in the road? Big rock used to be there. Why QWERTY? to slow typists so the mechanical hammers on typewriters wouldn’t jam. Why do US headlights cast light up? To light up signs that are now almost universally lit by electricity.
n
>> I suppose that means $7 by Thanksgiving? We never dropped below $5.40 this summer AFAIK.
Ya gotta come to Delaware where Joe thinks he sees $1.99/gal to top off the Vette.
And you folks in Georgia…yeah, you know who you are…you best show up this time.
Oops, I thought I saw my comment posted. Thanks, Nick.
As for shining up, I suppose. I switched to hard cutoff Cibie headlights, and did notice that. Where I am, signs are not illuminated. I am used to it, and flash my high beams if necessary. Mostly local, so don’t need the signs. When I am out of town, I use Google Maps extensively, so don’t really need signs, but they are illuminated. US sealed beam headlights spill a lot of light up because the prisms in the lenses are poorly molded. Cibie pioneered very sharp molding, and dramatically reduced scattered light. Now, US spec lights, especially HID, scatter a lot of light up. Whether this is intentional or an artifact is moot: they do. They are poor at protecting oncoming drivers from glare. They could be better. LED replacements, even the “high quality” ones, often produce a lot of glare, which is part of the large source characteristic. They give the LED lights a bad reputation unnecessarily.
There is a lot more to this, and we could discuss ad infinitum. I actually had sealed beam lights that were great. Again, moot because cars are now burdened by the “aero” lights that can’t be changed easily.
Last night I learned that even in my mid 50s, I’m still capable of playing the “just one more chapter, then bed” game with myself…. hard to fault D1 for the same weakness.
n
I do this every freaking night. The wife has given up and just rolls over so my lamp light does not bother her. She lives with a big teenager, 13 or 19 as you see fit.
The daughter and I watched the Nirvana Unplugged MTV concert on youtube tonight. Both of us think that Cobain was freaking awesome even if he was coming off heroin again..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_24pJQUj7zg
Getting the back end running on RHEL as part of that effort wouldn’t be a terrible idea unless your back end is tied to COM and Excel or other Microsoft tech.
Our calculation engine can be embedded in Excel or have Excel embedded in it. Versatile.
In the short run, I think it is just a matter of time before Redmond announces their own Docker clone similar to Podman on various Red Hat Linux flavors, embedding the tech so that developers can rely on it being there “out of the box”. Docker itself has proven that the Linux container concept can run on Windows via WSL.
I wish I understood half of what you said there. I don’t Docker or Podman or WSL.
Yah. The IRS and the state tax agency.
The two insulated wires, held together, are about as thick as a typical USB cable. Sure, the USB usually has more than two wires, but it shows that the conductors here are very thin. I’d mentioned as an indicator that the unit doesn’t draw much electricity. It can’t because the wires won’t support it.
I don’t know if it uses a glow plug, a spark, or undisguised malice to get the fire started. Haven’t disassembled the heater and of course the manual doesn’t have any practical information. If you apply power and hit the On button, a small fan starts, then a minute or two later a bigger fan starts and air starts moving, then a couple minutes later the air gets warm. Clearly it takes a while to build the power to start ignition, but the mechanism is currently a mystery.
All of the similar units have control panels which include thermostats and timers.
Heh. Probably the latter, given that it’s from a communist country.