And hope the rain holds off. We got just a thin spatter yesterday. Not even enough to get things wet. Still had to cover the truck bed with a tarp, just in case. I use magnets to hold it in place, so it’s not difficult, just a step I dislike dealing with. The humidity would have benefited from some rain to clear the air. Temps were nice all day though.
Did my pickup, went by my secondary location to drop some stuff off. Dropped off filters for the A/C at my rent house, and stopped in to chat with my auctioneer. He’s still not ready to start selling my stuff again. I also picked up some books from him. Good stuff like animal husbandry, small engine repair, and a multi volume “best works in English” set. Hit the Goodwill bins for an hour on my way home. Got some books for me, and some for eventual resale. Of course I grabbed some DVDs too.
Did a tiny bit of cleaning up and organizing. Mainly avoided working at home though…
So hopefully today I can get caught up with SOME of the tasks.
Maybe I’ll cook something too.
I will surely stack or restack something. You should too.
nick
Half of TN is ecstatic, the other half is crying in their Cheerios. TN has not won against Arkansas in 27 years. Vanderbilt has not won against Alabama in, well, forever.
70 F here on the west side of Fort Bend County. It is very dark and overcast. Winter is coming.
Lots more people die with extreme cold than extreme heat. Are you ready ? Got heat sources ? Got food ? Water ?
My #25 Aggies stomped #9 Missouri yesterday. People are freaking out as our pro style qb seems to be healthy again.
Built in. Not above the range, I imagine, due to size. Desirable if it works.
Hopefully, you have the trim plate. That might be unobtainium depending on the age of the unit.
Installed, with trim kit, any built in microwave is going to run around $1000 minimum in the end. I just went through that buying process over the Summer.
Bosch was looking at taking over Whirlpool a few months ago when we were looking.
Population isn’t the problem in Tampa-St. Petersburg but where the people live.
People have lived in new places like the Pinellas beaches, South Tampa, Bayshore, and Shore Acres for over 50 years, but if you look on a map, all of the development up the Hillsborough/Pinellas county line since the early 90s was elevating swamp land to the 12 foot minimum required by zoning post-Andrew.
Tampa Bay has been swimming naked for over 30 years.
Regardless of what happened in the back half of the season last year, Alabama has been in trouble since they rolled into Tampa last September expecting a blowout win over my alma matter and ended up 30 seconds and one blown call from surviving the scare with only a 10-3 win.
The Red River Classic is next weekend.
The rankings will be really chaotic and the coach’s seat may get warm if Texas doesn’t win that shiny metal hat for the strippers to wear at the alumni party in Dallas on Saturday night.
Deputy Mike DeStefano (@mikedapopo on TikTok) posts short videos about his life as a deputy in rural North Carolina, and is now using his platform to address those who are seeking to help his community.
https://redstate.com/jenniferoo/2024/10/06/north-carolina-deputy-urges-people-who-want-to-help-western-north-carolina-do-not-donate-to-fema-n2180196
Pictures from local Friday night football.
https://www.raymondthompsonphotography.com/Midway
Time sink for a Sunday.
83F and sunny here. Humid too.
Stuff to do, stuff to do, and more stuff to do…
n
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anAFUYAzopg
Wild West Hygiene Horrors: How Bad Was It?
– hint, it was bad.
n
If you are interested in music, especially why it sounds like it does, and it’s place and impact on our lives, you will enjoy watching this.
The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse
Rick Beato
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bZ0OSEViyo
I’ve mentioned Rick Beato before, he’s an industry insider, had a successful career, and is a thinker about the issues. I’ve learned a lot about the industry I worked in and never understood by watching him.
n
In the world of film, watching the ‘making of’ for one of the new starwars movies, I think the one with Jar Jar, will show you that they approach film editing the same way and the same thing has happened. They can save a single word, replace half the scene, etc. and the editor comments that now they can’t throw away ANY take, as there might be something the director wants to use in it.
As one of the commentors relates, they aren’t capturing performances, they are creating them.
n
One of the two ovens at the BOL is a Neff (Siemens) dual microwave / oven. It is a very nice, useful unit. I use it more than the matching oven-only unit, because it has less volume and gets up to temperature fast. It was not cheap, but was worth it.
Some thoughts about CDs and DVDs based on my ongoing efforts to rip all the media I own to my server.
– if you want to keep it long time, keep it in its original case. Use copies in your car. The Case Logic style sleeves and movement will destroy the disc. So will excessive handling. I see a lot of scratches that were caused by loading mistakes or mishandling.
– if you want to keep it a long time, buy quality to start with. Thicker discs hold up better than thin ones, and encoding rates matter. If there is one movie on a disc it’s going to be better than if there are two.
– some discs just will not rip. This may be a ‘me’ problem with a worn out disc drive. The discs look clean, but might have an error in a critical place. I suspect that they write on a reserved area or outside of spec as a copy protection feature, since consumer grade gear is much ‘looser’ when it comes to what is readable.
– ripping a couple of thousand discs will wear out your disc drive.
– the printed coating is important, take care of the “non data” side of the disc too. I have found discs with “holes” in the reflective part due to damage of the protective painted side.
– copies don’t last as long as commercially produced discs, and are more fragile.
– keep them in a cool dry place. Some discs get ‘cloudy’ which looks like it might be caused by outgassing or heat affecting the disc.
– clean discs rip faster than dirty.
– it’s possible to improve scratches to the point where the disc is readable, but it’s most often a waste of time. If you don’t like the artist of film, don’t bother.
– keep them dry. moisture will corrode and damage the printed side and the reflective layer.
– a surprising number of DVDs and some CDs were clearly never played. If you bought it, play it!
– it’s worth getting them onto a server where they are easy to access. You will probably watch/listen to more of your library than if it’s in a drawer or media cabinet.
n
(work avoidance, it’s a thing.)
I use it more than the matching oven-only unit, because it has less volume and gets up to temperature fast. It was not cheap, but was worth it.
– it’s very convenient to use the smaller convection oven when just heating frozen stuff. Kinda like an air fryer…
n
RBT did a lot of testing, back in the day, but manufacture & materials are sadly ephemeral, not sure how much is still relevant.
Taiyo Yuden “Hecho en Japan” blank CD-Rs were still solid when I bought a sleeve ~ six years ago, but I haven’t needed more since I switched my daily drive to a 2018 Camry, which lacks a CD player outside of the rental models.
I have CD players in my Ranger, Expy, and wife’s Oddysee
n
And XM is now offering us $3/month for 36months to come back. That’s like 5% of normal billing.
n
I had an XM offer a couple of weeks ago. $3/mo for a while, maybe 36 months, I forget, and then “the low price of $29.95 a month”. Plus sales tax, I’m sure.
It was sort of weird. Lots of glorious text about so many channels on the truck radio and then 350+ more via their phone or web app. They know I have a 2019 Frontier.
They misspelled my last name. Stuck an extra e in the middle. It’s not hard to spell. My domain is my last name spelled in reverse.
Directly into the trash.
I need to hop on their website on Monday, when chat is available, and see what they will offer me if I threaten to cancel. I am paying $19.00 a month for two vehicles. Wife likes it or I would probably dump it and just use the 3,300 songs on my iPhone.
Same here, tho it was $4 – down from $25.
I kept a mental record and I listened to about six hours of music in 5000 miles of driving. Even at four dollars it just wasn’t worth it.
I much prefer books on tape, i.e. Audible, which is $15.
(tape … dating myself).
when you loses SNL:
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/saraharnold/2024/10/06/snl-trolls-tim-walz-for-lying-n2645801
I never really tried the app, but there was an amusing comment a few years ago to the effect that the original app was so bad that it was easier to simply put a baby monitor in the cab of their truck and use that to listen in the house, than to reinstall it for every single use on a tablet.
The Kamel Humper and Tampon Tim are going to win the election for tRump. How tone deaf do you have to be to Tweet: “I’m sending more money to Lebanon (not NC) for humanitarian relief” while US Citizens get “sorry, we’ve run out of FEMA money. Suck it up.” Every penny for Lebanon should go to hurricane relief in the US.
I can only hope the sheeple get wise to these two grifters.
This offer said cancel after the three years, no auto billing.
I hate commercials so I’d do it if they offer it to me in the Ranger. This particular offer was for the wife’s honda.
n
Hmmm. Gaffigan is interesting. If the line was improvised or he helped write the sketch, his real target may have been the personality type who likes to ‘have a couple” in the Gerrmany section of EPCOT.
Man, I hate that personality type having lived near the parks for most of my life, and Gaffigan spends a lot of time in Central Florida. I don’t know if he lives there, but it would make sense.
Gaffigan plays one of Uncle Ted’s “fixers” in the “Chappaquiddick” film, Paul Markham. Depending on your point of view, Markham went back to the overturned car to attempt to get the girl out either to make sure the truth came to light -or- help Kennedy hide what happened. Markham and the other “fixer” failed.
Failed to get the girl out that is. The film portrays the fixers as encouraging Kennedy to tell the truth, but it was still a career risk for Gaffigan.
If wanted clowns I’d go to a f*cking circus:
From the NAGR:
The constitution states very clearly that treaties have to be ratified by the Senate.
The courts have no function in the process.
“Installed by the courts” is a scare tactic.
I am done with you.
Remove my email from your files.
What we need fast-tracked to the U.S. Supreme Court is a $1 Trillion lawsuit by the families of fentanyl victims against the corrupt criminal government of Mexico.
If I’m not needed as Trump’s new science advisor maybe Border Czar is open.
New policies after inauguration:
That’s 156 square miles per death. They don’t shut the drugs off the whole nation is in escrow in 5-6 weeks.
From FEMA. Note the “received by the state” status. Not “given to people in need.”
Situation: Locally executed, state managed, and federally supported operations continue.
Lifelines: (FEMA RIV SLB, as of 6:00 p.m. ET, Oct 5)
Safety & Security:
▪ GA: 12 curfews remain in effect for Richmond counties
▪ NC: Unified local, state, and federal US&R operations ongoing in
impact areas; mandatory/voluntary remain evacuation orders
and/or curfews remain in place
▪ SC: US&R missions have been completed and federal resources
are redirecting to North Carolina
Food, Hydration, Shelter: (ARC, as of 7:50 a.m. ET, Oct 6)
▪ FL: 11 (-1) shelters / 432 (+3) occupants
o 70 Food distribution sites; 15 food banks operational/1.2M
meals received by the state
▪ GA: 8 shelters / 448 (-75) occupants
o 3.5M meals/1.4M liters of water received by the state
▪ NC: 15 (-7) shelters / 825 (-90) occupants
o 32 Mass feeding sites; 5M meals/7.5M liters of water
received by the state
▪ SC: 1 shelter / 81 (-19) occupants
o 28k meals and 688k liters of water received by the state
▪ TN: 4 shelters / 65 occupants
▪ VA: All sheltering operations closed as of 10/5; significant need
for bottled water in impacted areas
Health & Medical:
▪ GA: All hospitals have returned to normal power and normal
water systems; 33 confirmed fatalities
▪ NC: All hospitals have returned to normal power; 70 (+7)
confirmed fatalities
▪ VA: All medical facilities return to full power; 2 confirmed
fatalities
Energy: (DOE Eagle-I, as of 7:30 a.m. ET, Oct 6)
o GA: 117k (-96k) (2%) customers without power
o NC: 143k (-91k) (3%) customers without power
o SC: 117k (-168k) (4%) customers without power
Communications:
▪ GA: 0 (-3) counties remain with 50% cellular sites without
service; federal disaster communication support enroute
▪ NC: 2 (-1) counties with cell sites with 50% plus sites down; 11
(-6) of 241 comms towers operating on generator power
▪ TN: Cellular sites restoration efforts ongoing; Satellite Data
Terminal kits and federal communication augmentation assets
in theater
[ despite almost all cell sites back on line]
Transportation:
▪ GA: All state roadways are open; however, county roads are still
being cleared; portions of freight/mass transit lines remain nonoperational
▪ NC: Significant road closures continue; all airports are now open
3 airports operating with power/communication issues
▪ TN: I-40, I-26, and 7 US/state routes remain closed; 30 of the
49 state routes originally closed are reopened
Helene – Southeast & Mid-Atlantic
Water Systems:
▪ FL: 18 (-8) Boil Water Notices; assessment and restoration continues
▪ GA: 330 (-39) active boil water notices are decreasing as systems resume fully
operations
▪ NC: Assessments are ongoing for potable and wastewater infrastructure; 96 (-3) active
boil water notices
▪ SC: Significant improvement to public water infrastructure; 1 Active Boil Water Notice
Advisory
▪ TN: Water infrastructure restoration continues; 18 active boil water notice advisories
▪ VA: Wastewater treatment plants in VDEM Regions disrupted; 24 (-10) active boil water
advisories
I tried to get XM streaming set up for a tabletop “internet radio” and failed.
I got caught in a kafka loop, were I need a credential I didn’t get set up properly to change the credential I didn’t get set up…
Maybe I’ll try again.
n
– everyone in the family knew she was nuts but she was allowed to continue spending 8 hours a day with kids.
n
– everyone in the family knew she was nuts but she was allowed to continue spending 8 hours a day with mentally challenged or disabled kids.
FIFY
I hate windows.
I’m trying to see why my youtube is stop and go… I restarted firefox in troubleshooting mode, and man there are a lot of ads, but I’m still getting spooling, so I’m watching my network and disk activity.
FFox is caching constantly. Even though I thought I shut off prefetch.
MS decided this was a perfect time to run windows update. And Defender is running a disk scan. AND system restore decided to run a restore point save so there is a sh!t ton of shadow copying going on.
With all that, my swapfile is moving sh!te in and out.
I’ve got 40GB left on my c drive…
n
“I hate windows. ”
Windows is proof of the ineffectiveness of cursing.
If cursing was effective in our magicless universe Bill Gates would have erupted with suppurating sores and died a slow and painful death decades ago.
n
Windows is a curse? Try VMS. Sorry if there are VMS pilots still in existence.
You are having a bad day, in spite of the theme for today. I truly wish you well.
Please take the time to set up Windows better than what you have. I am not familiar with Windows 8 (which you are running?), but in Windows 10 there are “operating hours” or some similar term. I have mine set to download update files, but wait for my OK to do any installations that require restarts. It just works. Pre-downloading really helped with my formerly very slow Internet.
YouTube slowness with your really fast Internet? Ridiculous! Even though I now have typical 40 Mb down, I sometimes use my 4 Mb DSL, and even then YT vids almost never pause, even when running at 2X speed. Maybe it is Firefox.
I ran Firefox on Linux, and thought it was OK, until I installed Chromium. When I went back to Windows, I immediately installed Chrome, and later Brave. I am constantly impressed with their speed. I don’t load them up with extensions. Brave doesn’t need any in my experience.
C’mon, man, you are way smarter than me at this computing stuff. If I can get Windows to run well, you should be even better. I say this with the greatest of respect, and not blame. I will admit to spending some time over the years learning, but all that seems unnecessary in my experience with the NT based versions. They seem to run fine with mostly stock settings.
VMS is the best minicomputer operating system that was ever developed, and VAXClusters the best clustering software. Period.
Remember when Windows went from “reboot it every dady” -if you can make it that long – to Windows NT?
Yeah, they got there by copying the best parts of VMS. Thanks to Dave Cutler, formerly from Digital Equipment Corporation, and sniped by Microsoft.
I remember my first Unix and my first Windows cluster. About half as good as what I had used 10 years earlier.
I’m biased since I was a VMS performance tuning expert at Digital, and I built VAXclusters for several clients, and managed a couple of our internal ones.
As far back as 1987, the rule was to reboot our VMS systems once a month, whether we needed it or not, to install patches.
Yeah, used to be I could run 8 YT streams at the same time w/out issues. When it stopped working like that, I blamed YT for F’ing with people running ad blockers, which they were doing. It never got better though.
I think the problem is either my C drive is too full, because I mostly see pauses and delayed video when I also see disk activity involving the pagefile and MBR. I’m stunned about how much disk writing firefox does with yt in several tabs. it’s non-stop even when the vids aren’t running.
I see Ffox only sipping B/sec for all the open tabs instead of KB or MB/sec when the vid is actually running.
I think I’m ready to try a new install of FFox, but I’ll have to export my bookmarks and saved log ins first.
Something is screwed up because it used to work without issue.
n
I managed our music collection a couple of years ago. What a slog! In the end, though, we still don’t play music all that often. Dunno why – both the CDs and the ripped versions are easily available.
I haven’t even tried with the movies. There are some I do value, though, so maybe I will eventually get a round tuit.
Yup. You’ve really gotta love companies that deliberately damage their product, in the hope and expectation that cheap readers will stumble over it without falling down.
Sadly, I expect that will only have an effect in the affected states, which were going to vote for Trump anyway.
Why is anyone sending money to Lebanon. If Lebanon stopped attacking Israel, Israel would not attack Lebanon. This is not difficult to understand. The civilians affected need to take their anger and outrage to their own government. Same for Gaza. Same for Iran, soon.
If you don’t have ad blockers, YouTube is intolerably full of ads. If you do have ad blockers, YouTube now deliberately gives you problems and delays. This was in the tech blogs a couple of months ago: rolling out by region.
We block ads at the whole-house level (PiHole), and we exclusively use browsers (Vivaldi, Brave, Firefox) with ad blockers. FWIW, PiHole reports that it has blocked 2579 ads in the last 24 hours. Crazy. It doesn´t get everything, of course, only ads served from external ad servers, so the ad blockers in the browsers are still essential. If there’s something we aren’t allowed to see without ads? Fine, bye now. Don’t use Chrome or Edge, at least, not without both Ghostery and AdBlock.
Pretty much every techie I know does the same, and anyone advised by a techie.
I don’t doubt that. I was recalling our developers’ complaints about monthly changes to that OS, and the disruption they said it caused for a day or so until they learned what had changed. The OS was very stable, and so was the hardware.
I was never a programmer, and not even an operator.
My background was RF design (radio stuff) and digital control of in-house designed test equipment. I was drafted into a mainframe computer development effort in the late 1960s, where I designed hardware and worked on manufacturing test solutions. Hardware is still my comfort zone.
In 1981 I was involved in setting up a hardware in the loop lab at a remote site using a VAX-11/780 computer with a couple of PDP-11s to interface with the hardware under development. I was mostly involved with power issues, and DEC helped a lot. Once set up, everything worked as needed. IIRC, the DEC hardware was very reliable, but sensitive to environment, especially power quality. Our power quality was terrible, and we spent a lot of money on conditioning.
Later, I oversaw an operation that used an HP 1000 to run a test bay. We liked that system, and had good support from HP, just as good as from DEC. We explored using something newer for office computing. The cost was about half that of PCs, but we could see that it was becoming a dead end for low end tasks.
Shortly after that, I became involved in outfitting a production operation with UNIX workstations. We had DEC, Sun, and later HP individual stations, separated for competition needs, so no networking. These were quite good, but very expensive, especially the software. I remember that Sun in particular was talking about a low end ‘NIX machine aimed at home use. It was to be cost competitive with PCs, but never became available.
I got away from this for a few years, and when I came back, Windows had made some inroads. At first, the best folks could say was that the hardware was cheaper than the UNIX stations, but not especially high performance. The other cost issue was that people could use their computers for everyday office needs, further reducing costs. The high end office networks, particularly from HP, were doomed. HP had a slick setup, but was just too expensive to buy and support.
Eventually, Windows systems took over, not because they were so good, but because they were low cost and good enough. I remember Jerry Pournelle pushing the Good Enough mantra, and agree.
Just reminiscing. No offense to anyone’s favorite computer or OS. To me, they are all tools: use what feels comfortable. I can also reminisce about soldering irons. I was never a computer hobbyist; I just bought and built them as tools. Most of my use is for “business” stuff. I just finished my tax submission to my CPA. The most pleasant part of that ugly task was using the computer.
In the early days of personal computing I was a hobbyist. Radio Shack model 1 and 100. Rented time on apple ][ to play games after school. Used a terminal (and my model 100 as a terminal) with a big DG in school. Supported an apple III used in a friend’s family business. Had looked at the new IBM PC and clones but they were too primitive.
In 2nd college, ran a CAD lab that had IBM PCs and apple Macs. The PCs were primitive but worked for CAD and some db stuff.
Left school and left personal computing behind for a while. Started back up with a gateway lappy, with a slide out trackball. Tried OS/2 Warp just for fun. Went back to windows 3.1 and 3.11. Tried a Newton but it was limited. OK for a road machine if paired with a PC at home…
And then just started getting better and better win laptops. Dual monitors were cool. My work exposed me to Sun workstations, SGI Onyx and deskside Onyx, HP *nix boxes, and eventually linux. I ran Mandrake and Redhat, and SuSe on PCs at home…j
————
now I want stability. I want “just works”. And I don’t want ads and spying. I’m not a pc otaku. I’m not a hobbyist.
————
@brad, with my googlefu I can’t find current issues or resolutions regarding youtube messing with adblockers. They used to, but most people seem to be back to normal. Not me. The first troubleshooting step is always asking “what changed” and I don’t have a clue if it’s not youtube itself.
It’s dang near unwatchable with ads, and on my primary device, this pc, it’s dang near unwatchable with multi minute long delays with nothing happening but a spinning arrow…
n