Cold but clear today, if last night’s weather holds. It was 47F when I went to bed. Of course it’s damp too, so it really feels cold.
Spent most of Saturday prepping and texturing the ceiling in the master bedroom and bath. It looks ok. Better than popcorn anyway, and certainly cleaner. Considering that it’s been about 20 years since I ran the texture gun, and I didn’t do a whole lot o that even back then, I’m happy with the result. My wife will be painting it today, primer (Kilz) then ceiling paint.
I’ll be buttoning up the property and knocking some more small jobs off the list. We’ll probably stay here most of the day, then head home.
I’ve got a load of trash, some metal for recycling, and 2 LP gas bottles for refilling in the truck. I’ll have to bring up some more bottles if I am going to be running the patio heaters, they go through gas like crazy.
I will have to ask the propane guy up here if there is a way to get set up for refilling BBQ bottles off the big tank. My guess is “no, no, and HELL NO.” Can’t hurt to ask though.
Lake is up quite a bit. Supposedly we got more than two inches of rain the just the last two days. With the area that feeds the lake, that made a large change in water level. Guess I missed my chance to replace some of the dock posts without standing in water… oh well. Gotta prioritize.
I’ll be moving some stacks up here, and some shelves to put them on the next trip up. Time to stock the BOL a bit better. Time to get a safe up here too.
Do some adding to your own stacks. Don’t wait for the New Year’s Resolution.
nick
Why not? As long as you’re outside, so any leakage blows away, I can’t really see much danger.
If Joe Sixpack were to do it while lighting his joint at the same time, well, that’s a different situation.
It’s like the heating guy telling me to have an electrician move a wire from A to B. Overly cautious, but I guess he has to say that.
Bingo.
Nick, if you can’t get an adapter for the main propane tank, see about getting another big-ish tank, to be used only for refilling the smaller bottles. You should be able to get a used one fairly cheap, siting it next to the current tank shouldn’t be a problem, and then never connect it to the house but instead put on refill stuff.
One of the guys working on the natural gas leak was smoking while working. He said a cigarette does not burn hot enough to ignite the gas. Just don’t light the cigarette near the leak. I think joints burn at a lower temperature. No experience there.
50 F here in Fort Bend County with lots of standing water still and that inefficient old fusion reactor coming up in the sky. Gotta love it, it’s the only one we have. Read “a pail of air” for going without.
“A Pail of Air” by Fritz Leiber https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/51461/pg51461-images.html
Somebody needs to get his lazy butt out and put more chlorine in the septic tank this afternoon. And build that new pc he bought the parts for over a year ago. The wife laughed when I told her I was going to do that today.
We went to see lights in Marble Falls last night. Mostly, it is an excuse to get out since the VA was open Friday and my wife worked.
The city parking around the event area is diagnonal, which makes things exciting when lots of kinda-sorted inebriated people show up at around the same time in the early evening driving big trucks/SUV and not in a mood to walk with kids.
In other words, Texas.
Leaving I nearly had my right rear quarter panel taken out by a Durango squeezing into the spot adjacent from the opposite direction of the angle, eager to play “Show Ya” with the two equally huge vehicles who had ben patiently waiting for that space and mine.
Adding insult was the Durango driver eager to flee the scene and starting to pop his door open just as I began backing and my passenger side mirror reached the point where the impact would have snapped the mirror off. HORN.
My wife said that his Jesus Truck was probably on order.
Oh for the time when cars had mirrors that didn’t stick out beyond the body line. I still have to be careful when walking between cars in parking lots, that I don’t bump into the hazardous modern monsters.
Get off my lawn!
The Mouse is getting busy with “Avatar 2” PR.
$2 billion break-even is a big number, even with movie tickets going for $15 each.
https://www.gq.com/story/james-cameron-profile-men-of-the-year-2022
In close quarters I fold my mirrors.
Truck has another CEL. Probably the other oxygen sensor. Replaced the left sensor a few months back. Suspect it is the right sensor.
The Durango was close. I doubt he could have exited the vehicle on that side if I hadn’t moved mine out. The mirror doesn’t protrude out much further than that side on my 2001 Solara, but the current generation Camry platform, used for the RAV4 and Highlander, has a wider base.
The last time I had to replace a passenger side mirror, the job was $600 because of paint matching. I laid on the horn even if it meant risking a physical confrontation – again, Texas – because I wanted to avoid the cost as well as a three week wait for body work.
Marble Falls tried to spread the circus out a bit by relocating the temporary ice skating rink further into downtown, but that attraction costs money so it was empty as we drove by heading home.
*Everything* within an hour drive of Austin has a higher percentage of inebriated people stumbling around these days than just a few years ago, even so-called “family” events. When people say they are into the “culture” of the city, they really mean the booze.
God help this place if the state ever legalizes weed.
The Camry doesn’t offer that ability
We have to fold the mirrors on the Exploder to get it into the garage.
The crazy thing around here is that every parking lot is close quarters with the size of the trucks now combined with Austin’s denial about being a major city. Memphis was just as bad, which is how I ended up with a $3000 claim at the Lizard.
54F and bright sun here north of Houston… really gorgeous day – just looking out the window. Bit on the chilly side IRL.
n
Ok, temp is coming up. Brunch has been eaten. Ceiling is getting primer. I guess I should do something more than fold laundry and cook.
n
>> $2 billion break-even is a big number, even with movie tickets going for $15 each.
What are these ‘movie tickets’ you speak of? Movies just come out of our Roku box.
Ask Tom Cruise. Or Sony.
Can’t imagine why I would go to a cinema. The experience isn’t pleasant anymore: idiots with cellphones, deafening sound levels, overpriced snacks. And $15/ticket?
At home is a much nicer experience, also a lot cheaper.
All the reasons I got a UST projector and 100″ screen.
Both 8:30-9:00 showings of “Knives Out: Glass Onion” were packed at my local theater, and you could have heard a pin drop during the quiet moments. Give adults something to watch, and adults will still show up in the cinema.
The flick was a little too woke IMHO, and I’d be concerned about the $400 million pricetag for the flick and the sequels if I were holding Netflix stock. However, the audience was there for escape and got what they wanted … along with popcorn.
What is this Roku of which you speak? Movies come off of BitTorrent.
(Joking, mostly. I don’t know the last time I got a movie via BT other than some Chinese movies or fansubs of animes not available in the US, by request, and I think it’s been years since anyone’s asked me to do so.)
I’m guessing HBO is turning a blind eye to the “House of Dragon” torrents.
They moved up the release date of the DVD set to a few days before Christmas instead of January.
I moved the 615 dvds I’ve already backed up to hard drive to a portable and brought them up here. D2 is watching Home Alone as we sit here. Unfortunately, I didn’t rip them by any criteria other than “they were sitting there…” so some that I know we have and want to watch aren’t on the drive yet.
I’ve got at least that many still to go, plus bluerays and blueray versions…
And some had audio sync issues or didn’t include the english audio (looking at you BeBop Cowboy). For most stuff I’d rather have a bad english dub than read subs.
The weird thing, and it’ probably directly related to win8 known issues with file copying, it takes longer to copy from my HD to the USB3 external than it did to RIP the movies. 10 minutes on average to copy. Most ripped in less than that. Had to let the copy process run overnight and part of the next day.
n
>> Spent most of Saturday prepping and texturing the ceiling in the master bedroom and bath.
Gotcha 😉
Microsoft announced EOL for Windows 8 in January. There won’t be any more fixes except for big money customers or in the event of some huge security exposure.
Plus I’m guessing the chipset on either the external drive or the computer is “USB 3 compatible” but not true USB 3. Not all blue USB ports are created equal.
>> Can’t imagine why I would go to a cinema. The experience isn’t pleasant anymore: idiots with cellphones, deafening sound levels, overpriced snacks. And $15/ticket?
Last time we went to a theater it didn’t go well when I shouted loudly to the projectionist to pause the movie cause I needed to pee. The manager “invited” us not to return.
Projectionist? One guy for all nine (?) screens in our cinema. All automated. Probably no projectionist if not for union rules.
“A Touch of Eternity (Perry Rhodan #57)” by Clark Darlton
https://www.amazon.com/Touch-Eternity-Perry-Rhodan-57/dp/4412660400?tag=ttgnet-20/
Book number fifty-seven of a series of one hundred and thirty-six space opera books in English. The original German books, actually pamphlets, number in the thousands. The English books started with two translated German stories per book translated by Wendayne Ackerman and transitioned to one story per book with the sixth book. And then they transition back to two stories in book #109/110. The Ace publisher dropped out at #118, so Forrest and Wendayne Ackerman published books #119 to #136 in pamphlets before stopping in 1978. The German books were written from 1961 to present time, having sold two billion copies and even recently been rebooted again. I read the well printed and well bound book published by Ace in 1974 that I had to be very careful with due to age. I bought an almost complete box of Perry Rhodans a decade or two ago on ebay that I am finally getting to since I lost my original Perry Rhodans in The Great Flood of 1989. In fact, I now own book #1 to book #106, plus the Atlan books.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Rhodan
BTW, this is actually book number 65 of the German pamphlets written in 1962. There is a very good explanation of the plot in German on the Perrypedia German website of all of the PR books. There is automatic Google translation available for English, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, French, and Portuguese.
https://www.perrypedia.de/wiki/Ein_Hauch_Ewigkeit
In this alternate universe, USSF Major Perry Rhodan and his three fellow astronauts blasted off in a three stage rocket to the Moon in 1971. The first stage of the rocket was chemical, the second and third stages were nuclear. After crashing on the Moon due to a strange radio interference, they discover a massive crashed alien spaceship with an aged male scientist (Khrest), a female commander (Thora), and a crew of 500. It has been over sixty-nine years since then and the Solar Empire has flourished with tens of millions of people and many spaceships headquartered in the Gobi desert, the city of Terrania. Perry Rhodan has been elected by the people of Earth to be the World Administrator.
Perry Rhodan’s scientists have built a new time front projector that builds a window 200 meters wide. Perry Rhodan and a select crew have gone into the slow time zone in pursuit of Marcel Rous and his crew. They find Rous, his crew, and the crew of the Gazelle that disappeared months before. But, then the inhabitants of the slow zone find them and attack.
Two observations:
1. Forrest Ackerman should have put two or three of the translated stories in each book. Having two stories in the first five books worked out well. Just having one story in the book is too short and would never allow the translated books to catch up to the German originals.
2. Anyone liking Perry Rhodan and wanting a more up to date story should read the totally awesome “Mutineer’s Moon” Dahak series of three books by David Weber.
https://www.amazon.com/MUTINEERS-Author-Market-Paperbound-01-Mar-1992/dp/B005CYZSEC?tag=ttgnet-20/
My rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars (1 reviews)
“Artemis I – Flight Day 11: Orion Surpasses Apollo 13 Record Distance from Earth”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/11/27/artemis-i-flight-day-11-orion-surpasses-apollo-13-record-distance-from-earth/
“On day 11 of the Artemis I mission, Orion continues its journey beyond the Moon after entering a distant retrograde orbit Friday, Nov. 25, at 3:52 p.m. CST. Orion will remain in this orbit for six days before exiting lunar orbit to put the spacecraft on a trajectory back to Earth and f a Sunday, Dec. 11, splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.”
About Rosewill stuff from Newegg, nice to hear it’s not all junk. Then again, folks that have a problem complain and happy folks go on with their life.
I found an Orico (sp?) drive case. Clear plastic which is neat. I can see what drive I have in my grubby paw and I don’t mind looking at circuit boards. For the princely sum of $8.
Meanwhile, I have a 500 GB Seagate external that has a ton of my junk. And I stumbled across the same thing but 1 TB. Not exactly sure where it came from. Lots of folders and sub folders and it was mostly .wav files. Disc Management cleaned it off.
Junk boxes are fun!
I think I’ll leave my WD 1TB SSD alone for now.
I have some spinning rust sitting on the shelves. A drive from my wife’s computer before I replaced with an SSD. Slovenly drive provided by Dell, 5,400 RPM. Replacing that made a huge difference in the speed of the computer.
I have a couple of 500 gigabyte SSDs sitting on the shelf gathering dust. The 1TB SSDs were placed in my new computer, just because I had space.
Two other drives are from my old computer before I replaced the computer in its entirety. New MB, video, PS, water cooling, case and fans. Drives are now two 2 TB M.2 SSDs. Fastest Western Digital made 18 months ago. W11 installed in a couple of minutes, boot time is about 15 seconds. On my old system loading 1,800 pictures would take 5 minutes, on this system takes less than a minute. USB-C and high speed memory card with the proper adapter.
At some point I will remove the rust from the shelves and destroy the drives. I have backups of everything on externally connected spinning USB rust and a couple of additional drives.
Gaack, I remember buying a 340 megabyte drive at Staples many moons ago for $300.00 at Staples and thinking that was a good price. It was way back then. Now $200 will get me 10 TB in an internal drive.
I also remember getting exciting getting a 500 megabyte thumb drive as a handout at a convention. Now I scoff at anything less than 4 gigabytes.
My first HDD with my student loan custom PC during the first old man Bush administration was a spendy 80 megabyte Seagate 4096. Thick as a brick, and twice the capacity of the standard 40 meg drive of the day. Of course, DOS could only partition a max of 32 megabytes. Added a 2nd drive of the same model for ~$500, all the motherboard could handle and added a whizbang controller card that turned 80 to the capacious 130 meg. Really stylin’ then!
Now I suffer along with a zillion USB port hub and a buncha externals totting up to around 70 terabytes. I read Lynn’s BackBlaze stats with interest.
An external case for a drive is a USB-to-SATA chip and some discrete components – really hard to screw that up.
The chip could be commodity junk, however. I have one older Seagate external drive which does not play well with Windows 7 and Apple USB ports in Boot Camp, triggering a blue screen of death. USB 2.0 compatible.
First PC I encountered (DOS version) was at the bank. An IBM PC of some kind, the first IBM offered. The bank sprang for the 5 Megabyte hard drive option which tacked on $3,000 to the price of the unit. I think the final cost was around $7K as the memory was maxed out and they got the biggest monitor possible (I think there were only two options). Dual booted into DOS and some weird proprietary OS to run some banking application, which the bank never used. At the time I wondered how I could ever fill up that hard drive.
DOS 3.0 was on one 5″ floppy. A couple other floppies were needed for the other OS. There was no mouse at the time. There were some other applications provided by IBM, a really bad word processor. VisiCalc was not even invented yet. Once VisiCalc arrived everyone in the bank wanted a PC. But only floppy systems for those peons.
Home. Traffic was heavier than usual, which I should have expected. Since they didn’t have a couple lanes closed for construction, it moved pretty well. Only 2 cars with their lights off this time. Almost invisible and completely deadly hazards.
Really nice day at the BOL today. Got some stuff done too. Even had mopey D1 set up the Christmas tree which turned out to be a very nice artificial tree. They are a lot cheaper in June, just sayin’.
Checked out the auctioneer I dropped stuff off to last week and he’s got most of it listed in this week’s sale, which is good. He had some similar stuff so it should draw buyers.
n
“The 8 Tribes of SciFi”
https://damiengwalter.com/2020/08/29/the-8-tribes-of-scifi/
“from any objective perspective, YA is the mainstream of sci-fi today”
1. Commercial Storytellers
2. The Weirds
3. Hard Sciencers
4. Military Conservatives
5. Progressive Fantasists
6. YA Adventurers
7. The LitFic Tourists
8. Sexy Beasts
Speaking of old computers, we had a very young secretary who had the oldest PC in the office, about 1989. It was just fine for her word processing needs, and she loved it. It was a genuine green screen IBM PC-XT that ran WordStar 4. She turned out many memos and other documents daily, and the old boat anchor never missed a beat. She had refused upgrades. One day, I walked by it, and the screen was showing typing – but she wasn’t there. She told me that she could out-type it, and it would eventually catch up. I never thought those had such a large keyboard buffer, so maybe there was another explanation. She also demonstrated how she could out-type it one-handed! She was a pretty fast typist, but I never saw anyone who could type well one-handed, at least at good speed. Some people are talented.
Reminds me, I remember Steve Allen saying on TV that he was skilled at playing the piano because he had been a fast typist. Wait, what? Really! He said it, but I can’t find any reference to it. He was one of the best piano players I have ever watched play. Besides being skilled, he had a certain ease of playing that was a pleasure to watch, more than anyone I have watched. On top of that, he said that most of his playing had no audience; he did so for his own enjoyment. It showed. Sure, he could be arrogant and silly, but he did a lot for many aspiring talented people. I will always miss his offbeat wit.
They just canceled school for tomorrow district wide due to a City of Houston boil water notice. (A notice I wouldn’t have gotten if not from our ISD.) Pressure in the system dropped too low due to a power outage at a treatment plant. Must be a big plant to affect all of Houston.
n
And I heard it here first.
I don’t think it applies way out here in Katy, based on the press release map.
“Houston issues boil water notice for 2.2 million customers”
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/11/27/houston-boil-water/
“The city of Houston is under a boil water notice after a Sunday morning power outage at one of its water treatment plants. Houston ISD schools will be closed on Monday.”
Slight deviation from the flight plan…and more kids with no school on Monday.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/27/us/maryland-small-plane-crash-power-lines/index.html