Warmish… but still cool. Same as all week, we should have a cool start, warm throughout the day, and finish warm. Started at 65F, got past 80F and finished in the 70s. Had a few low clouds and puffy white stuff in the sky, but mostly clear.
Did pickups all over town yesterday. And did kid shuffling. Didn’t do much around the house despite my stated desire. Sometimes, it just doesn’t happen.
So TODAY! for sure!! That’s the plan anyway. Get some stuff listed. Get some more stuff put away. Get some stuff out for Halloween. I think I’m not going crazy this year. I’ve had some ideas, but dunno if I’ll follow thru. Lots of work, and spending some actual money would be involved, and I don’t honestly think that will happen.
Got other stuff on my mind. And it ain’t seven women.
We’ve fallen pretty far, and have a bunch more falling to do. It’s gonna be really hard to work our way back up. It’s gonna take a while. It’s gonna take a lot of work.
It’s gonna take stacks. Join the party.
nick
I don’t know. The vendor may have been Land’s End, which is somewhat surprising but not totally unexpected as Sears Holdings or whatever they call themselves now circles the drain.
Companies exist to make money for their owners. If they can’t do it on margin, or by selling, they will find a way.
————
Vertical, and moving, not fully engaged…
n
Some cretin has distributed my email address to multiple spammers. The email was probably gathered from one of the many compromised sites where the email was used. I am getting 25+ spam emails a day. Today I have 9 emails with the exact same content, all from different email addresses. Companies that expose email addresses because of their lack of security should be required to send every person whose email was compromised a $100 VISA gift card. I don’t care if it bankrupts the company. They should either go out of business or feel the pain of their stupidity and lack of management thinking security is a waste of money.
Then there is the issue of people whose email accounts that have been compromised and are being used as spam relays. These people have obviously short changed themselves by not keeping their OS up to date, not running basic protection software, or just being complete idiots by clicking on a like thinking they have won a new motorhome. The owner of the address that is compromised should also be held liable with being fined $10.00 for each spam email sent from their address.
Cretins.
As I’ve written before, I saw the dark side of humanity with regard to Land’s End returns at their outlet in the Madison suburbs last Fall, but something about Happy Returns and the coordination of consumer information it offers clients doesn’t smell right.
Sears Holdings is poorly managed but has some brands people still value.
63F and clear again today. Feels a bit chilly.
—————————-
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/boeing-satellite-intelsat-33e-explodes-space-anamoly/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13993583/NASAs-new-20m-spaceship-hurtling-space-uncontrollably-malfunctioning.html
– clickbait, as it’s a testbed not what most people would think of as a “spacecraft” although that is exactly what it is. Still, rough week for everyone that isn’t fascinated by the letter X
n
Subbing again today, day 4 of 5 this week, day 4 for the same teacher. I also have a commitment tomorrow for another teacher.
The students with their cell phones and watches is just both amazing and annoying. I watch for cell phones but I also see students using their Apple Watches to text. By school policy I can take their watch if I see them texting. They are subtle. The girls are the absolute worst. I guess the need to talk about another girl behind their back is overwhelming. I suspect most of the texts are petty, snotty remarks about someone else. I think the texting urge is stronger than the mating urge.
Most get their important sleep interrupted as they sleep with their phones by, or in, their bed. Getting multiple texts a night is not unusual. Some little piece of gossip starts and spreads rapidly to the rest. The sad thing is that if someone else talked about them, the way they are talking about others, they would be devastated and in tears.
We experienced that with one of our exchange students. We took her phone at 10:00 PM and did not give it back until 7:00 AM. Her mood and school improved significantly after we did that. She was just not getting enough sleep.
That phone is the most important thing in their lives. Sad.
We have also seen a huge up-tick in spam, in the past several weeks. Dunno what’s going on, but some group or groups are “working” hard. Since lots of it gets through the spam filters, so they must be trying out new techniques.
Why can’t the spam filters detect spoofing? If the mail says it’s from “Acme Inc.”, but the actual sending address and all links go to “hacked.site.com”, this ought to be a massive red flag.
My version of Outlook, on the Mac and PC, seem to do a fairly good job. I don’t see the emails on my iPad or iPhone using the Apple mail app. Few actual spam emails get to the inbox and most are in the spam folder. When I check Outlook on the PC or the Mac, I find dozens of spam emails every single day.
The emails are so badly formatted, so poorly presented, such poor English (or just gibberish), I wonder how the spammers think anyone is going to fall for their crap. A lot of the emails are Geek Squad or Norton. No links in the email, just a phone number to call if the person thinks the ~$500 invoice is incorrect. I am certain the phone number will ask for the credit that was used, which some unwitting person will provide, and boom, the person is hosed.
I do get a few that tell me I will be arrested if I don’t pay for missed jury duty. With gift cards.
With the amount of information that is spread on the news and other sites, it is a wonder that people still fall for this crap. But they do. Otherwise the spammers would quit.
Every few weeks on the local news, the trouble shooting reporter, is reporting on someone who got scammed into online work, nephew (or grandson) in prison, etc. These people keep sending money until they are out 10’s of thousands before they realize they have been conned.
My MIL got conned for $1,200. She got a phone call from someone claiming to be her grandson. He was stranded in Mexico and needed bail money. He knew exactly how the real grandson addressed her, he knew information about her (the nephew’s father), enough that convinced her it was real. She went to Walmart and got a gift card. The Walmart person told it was probably a scam but the MIL “knew” better. The MIL has always been tight with her money.
She gave the gift card information over the phone. A couple hours later she received the call again and this time the request was for lawyer fees. At that point she got suspicious and called her son who told the that the grandson was sitting in his living room.
The scammer was good, very good. He had to know the grandson to have been able to gather that much information. Or maybe the grandson had put the information in another forum, maybe Facebook, answering one of those surveys, and that was enough for scammer.
I’ve seen a huge uptick in spam with my name, address, and phone number in the text. And they’ve done a pretty good job with the text and english language. Someone is putting effort into a newly harvested db.
n
Gee, wonder what the going rate per hundred thousand records might be for that “newly harvested db”.
as the miscreants have filed bankruptcy, yet are wasting the equivalent of many lives as the resources and time of innocent people are expended, a gofundme to raise funds to harass and make those miscreants miserable for the rest of their lives would be appropriate.
Fixed it for you.
I booked my cruise a couple of months ago using my Costco Citi card. Apparently Citi is selling that information to Costco as I am now getting emails from Costco about their cruise packages. That rebate I get from the card is apparently being offset by marketing valuable information and is being sold.
Amazon is the worst. They sell a lot of information about my purchases to other entities. Amazon says the information is anonymized. Yea, right. How come these other parties have my email address, my name, cell phone number and street address. Lying sacks of sh*t.
I always make Costco give me the rebate in cash/check.
Cash flow is life to Issaquah. Nothing else matters. Hit them where it hurts as much as possible.
Sam’s Club Mastercard is far worse for privacy since Mastercard has a deal with Google.
“Trump Winning Every Swing State is Most Likely Scenario: Nate Silver Model”
https://conservativebrief.com/nate-silver-model-86611/
“Nate Silver’s most recent prediction is that former President Donald Trump could win all of the important split states in the 2024 election.”
“Silver’s research shows that Trump has a 24.4% chance of winning all seven swing states in November. This is the most likely outcome. The forecast also says that Harris has a 15.6% chance of winning all the battleground states.”
This is not a done deal by far.
Hat tip to:
https://thelibertydaily.com/
Wow, the Drudge Report is getting more and more vicious by the day. Drudge is now reporting anything that he can find anyone expounding on the intertubes, legit or not. The latest is that he is showing a picture of Trump with Jeffery Epstein and some model claiming that Trump groped her 30 years ago.
https://drudgereport.com/
We have also seen a huge up-tick in spam, in the past several weeks. Dunno what’s going on, but some group or groups are “working” hard. Since lots of it gets through the spam filters, so they must be trying out new techniques.
Why can’t the spam filters detect spoofing? If the mail says it’s from “Acme Inc.”, but the actual sending address and all links go to “hacked.site.com”, this ought to be a massive red flag.
Gmail does that. Since I have my corporate email hosted by gmail, I get all of the advantages of gmail. It is a blessing. Rarely does spam get through as their honeypots are awesome.
I do my rebate from home and get an electronic deposit.
I could claim I was groped by the Humper 30 years ago. I can
producecreate a picture to prove it. Where are my millions?Maybe you are just too dull for spammers to care.
OUCH!
Voice calls, email, and snail mail are increasingly junk or scams. If the land line rings it goes to voice mail. I am never answering it. If my cell rings and the person isn’t in my contact list, then they go straight to voicemail (and, honestly, even if they’re in my contact list it’s probably going to voicemail). Most of the snail mail gets torn up and thrown in the trash without even being read before I even get back into the house. Heck, I only check the mail box about twice per week.
Essentially, if you aren’t someone I already know trying to contact me via text then you’re probably getting ignored. lol 🙂
Random thoughts:
Yesterday while sitting on the porch I saw a food delivery pull up for a neighbor. Brand new Prius. I just shook my head…
Tesla is offering 0% financing on the 3 and Y.
Gotta pay for that survival compound at the edge of the swamp somehow. I think Drudge also has a condo in The Four Seasons in Downtown Miami.
Hybrids make sense for delivery guys who stop and start a lot.
Or taxis.
$739 Million in regulatory credits last quarter according to Bloomberg.
Elon has plenty of short term cash.
‘We must not publish a study that says we’re harming children because people who say we’re harming children will use the study as evidence that we’re harming children, which might make it difficult for us to continue harming children.’– JK Rowling
This is the state of the art in “science” today. Narrative over everything; consensus beats evidence.
Hey, now that there’s news about flouride in the water reducing childrens’ IQ, I wonder what else the John Birch society was right about.
Just sayin’.
Subbing in high school it appears to me the bell curve is moving left and becoming more like a bell ski slope.
That phone is the most important thing in their lives. Sad.
I just voted at our little SBC church halfway between the office and the house. The guy in front of me in line pulled out his cellphone and started doing something on it. One of the ladies came up and pointed at the no cell phone sign to him. He said sorry and put it up. Right before I pulled my cellphone out.
People can’t live without that dopamine hit for even a few minutes.
“McDonald’s says onions from California-based produce company linked to deadly E. coli outbreak”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mcdonalds-says-onions-california-grower-203951373.html
“A California-based produce company was the source of fresh onions linked to a deadly E. coli food poisoning outbreak at McDonald’s, officials with the restaurant chain said Thursday. Meanwhile, other fast-food restaurants — including Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC and Burger King — pulled onions from some menus.”
“McDonald’s officials said that Taylor Farms, of Salinas, California, sent onions to one distribution facility, which led the fast-food chain to remove Quarter Pounder hamburgers from restaurants in several states. McDonald’s didn’t say which facility it was.”
Sounds like somebody pooped in the onion field.
Funny, I voted this afternoon, and turned my phone off.
It wasn’t until I read this latest thread that I realized I never turned it back on.
I use the smart phone features, but only when I want to. Mostly Android Auto.
I would argue but … well … I had to log on to read that …
But in my defense sometimes I turn my phone to airplane mode and it takes days for me to realize.
It annoys the people that try to contact me (both of them). Heh.
I just realized today that my brother 3170 printer can’t talk to the Starlink router, Brother’s only 2.4 GHz enabled, not the 5.0.
Now there are some sort of automatic fail back because the Roku connected at 2.4, but even after splitting the bands and giving a password to the 2.4 separately the brother still can’t connect.
(Once split the Roku wanted the password for the 2.4 GHz band, and quickly reset itself to that.)
i’ve completely forgotten about how to set up the Brother, time to google I guess.
no rush.
“The New Frontiers Series, Book One: The Ship” by Jack L Knapp
https://www.amazon.com/New-Frontiers-Book-One-Ship/dp/1720012105?tag=ttgnet-20/
Book number one of a eight book science fiction space opera series. I reread the well printed and well bound POD (print on demand) trade paperback self published by the author in 2018. I have all eight books in the series and am rereading them now with the number seven and eight books that I just bought from Big River.
Wow, great story. An older engineer buys a bunch of Nikola Tesla’s journals in an old chest and spots a design for an “electric turbine” that was never built. He builds a working version of the electric impeller after many restarts and has an anti-gravity device. The rest of the story concerns project funding and building various containers for the electric impeller and various peoples trying to steal the design.
The writing of the story is a little bit rough, a little more editing would have been good. But for me, the story is always the most important thing. This is my second read so that makes it a five star book for me. In fact, I may add this book to my six star list.
BTW, this is not the first time that a story has been written similar to this. Several stories have “magical” engines for space drives. A very similar book is John Varley’s most excellent “Red Thunder” which uses the squeezer drive.
https://www.amazon.com/Red-Thunder-Lightning-Novel/dp/0441011624?tag=ttgnet-20/
The reason why I like these stories so much is that it is not just the new drive device, it is also the design and work to build the container around the new device. Another person pointed out that a similar story is Pournelle’s “High Justice”.
My rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.2 out of 5 stars (514 reviews)
Lynn
I’m shocked. Shocked!
The real danger is if the E. Coli is antibiotic resistant.
Go back 20 years, before the most productive tomato farms in the world outside Tampa were plowed under to build the area’s first Amazon warehouse, and the antibiotic resistance stats among the migrant farm workers were off the charts, mostly due to the easy access to even high grade antibiotics in the underground pharmacies serving the community.
Amazon’s warehouse going in may have prevented a serious outbreak.
OTOH, the price of tomatoes went through the roof after the farmers sold out.
$20 Reeboks. Enjoy ’em, folks.
>>People can’t live without that dopamine hit for even a few minutes.
It’s the possible adrenaline hit that I hope not to have to encounter during those few minutes without the other hardware temporarily not on my belt.
I go to the grocery store and wherever else without my phone. Like, who would I call, if for instance, I have car problems?
Use the phone for my shopping list? A scrap of paper and a pencil work just fine.
I discovered yesterday that the Frost ATM at the HEB in Burnet is limited to $1000 per transaction. Per day? I don’t know. I don’t know if that limit is for everyone. I have only one ATM card and it’s from Frost.
I hit the zero one time too many for $200 bucks.
Seems like the limit years ago was like $60 per day and $300 a week. But that was the early ‘80’s when $60 was a lot of money. For me, anyway.
I haven’t tried Airplane mode. I do have someone’s phone set to Silent. He gets a couple or three calls a day from people that are not in his contacts and they don’t leave a voice mail or send a text message.
Meh. That phone is going to be turned off the next time I go to Marble Falls for coffee from Wal-Mart and the big HEB for a couple of things HEB doesn’t carry here. But that’s going to be after Christmas…..
That should cover any annual “Merry Christmas!” calls.
You may need narrower 802.11n channels in the 2.4 GHz range if you are in a noisy WiFi environment. The Starlink router should have a setting which will have options for 20, 40, and 20/40 MHz.
Some devices are more sensitive than others to the noise and will only work with 20 MHz channels.
Ya know what? There’s a difference between being alone and being lonely.
“Alone” is like he’s working in Dallas and didn’t come home for almost a year… because his weekends were taken up with taking care of his Mom. That was a good thing. And a few years later, almost another year taking care of his Dad. That was a good thing, too. But we talked on the phone almost every day.
“Lonely” is different. I’m sorting it out.
I call folks. If they answer it usually feels like I’m interrupting whatever they are watching on the TV. No one calls me but once in a blue moon. Shrug.
Dunno.
I really don’t want to be the old person at the checkout at the HEB that won’t shut the f**k up. I’ve dealt with them when I was working at HEB and it was almost always very cool. I knew they needed to talk to someone and yeah, the boss bitch would complain at me for letting them hold up the line but I didn’t care.
I’m just feeling whiny tonight. I’ll get over it.
@paul, there is a space and it’s not filled the way it used to be. Of course you notice. Some people clean, some take up a craft, some lose themselves in TV or books… or exercise…
You’ll find a way to compensate, it’s still early days. From watching others, I’d say that a full year needs to go by before your brain is working normally again. It’s a big change, it shouldn’t be easy.
n
“Hundreds of female golfers asking LPGA to keep transgender player Davidson from qualifying for tour”
https://justthenews.com/events/hundreds-female-golfer-asking-lpga-keep-transgender-player-davidson-qualifying-tour
“Now, 275 female golfers have signed a letter sent to the Ladies Professional Golfers Association (LPGA) and the US Golf Association urging Davidson’s removal from the tournament, according to the International Golf Federation.”
Unreal, the guys pretending to be women are everywhere.
“You’ll find a way to compensate, it’s still early days. From watching others, I’d say that a full year needs to go by before your brain is working normally again. It’s a big change, it shouldn’t be easy.”
I used to call my dad almost every Sunday. Other times, to, if I thought of something. He’s been gone for decades. It took several years before I quit reaching for the phone on Sunday.
Twice in the last month came across something and though “I should call dad about xxx”. That probably hadn’t happened for at least a year before that. The thought patterns run deep, and even when they get disused, they are still there. It’s the stuff that shaped who you are, so it never goes entirely away.
And Kamala’s polls continue to crash, RCP National Average has Kamala +0.3, she was +2.8 two weeks ago. And the RCP Battlegrounds now has Trump at +0.9.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/
Can I submit that all of the polls taken before this week were faked ?
>>“Hundreds of female golfers asking LPGA to keep transgender player Davidson from qualifying for tour”
Keep spreading the forfeitures sport by sport and the $$$ will follow.
https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/four-college-volleyball-teams-forfeit-san-jose-state-possible-trans-pl-rcna174118