Hot and humid again and still. Well over 100F in my driveway yesterday but I missed the peak. It was still 99F in the shade at 7pm. Today will likely be similar. Which should be miserable.
Didn’t do much yesterday. Got my trash and debris from the BOL disposed of. Took D1 to an appointment. Mostly caught up on auctions. Several things I need are in this week’s sales. Hope I get a few.
Today will mostly be eaten by picking up a trailer, heading to San Antonio, picking up a load of stuff there, and heading home. Should be about 7 hours round trip, once I have the trailer. I’ll be driving the Expedition as it has more towing capacity. It’s more comfortable, but drinks more gas. At least I’ll have the Jim Butcher audio book to listen to. Should be pretty close to the end by the time I get home.
I ordered a set of the first 4 books in the series since I’m liking this one so much. I’ve read them, some more than once, but I’m laughing at the humor and turn of phrase. There is a lot of detail in the books, and knowing where the story goes, it’s easy to see where some of the arcs start. One inconvenient thing is that the set is MP3 audio on CDs. I’ll have to convert and rip to regular CDs to listen in my Ranger, it doesn’t play mp3. I think it’s about 10 hours per book, so it will take me a while to get through the first ones, after I finish the current one. The MP3 sets are MUCH cheaper than standard 10 disc CD sets. 4 disks vs 40 is a dramatic reduction.
It might be easier to move them to my phone and play through an FM modulator. That’s how I have my XM radio attached in the Ranger. Or move them to a different phone… android really doesn’t handle concurrent audio from different sources very well. I’ll lose the turn by turn navigation, or the audio stream. Or I could swap out the older factory radio for something more capable. I’ve got the upgraded radio, that will play mp3s, on the shelf as a backup. Nothing is ever as easy or straightforward as it should be though, and I’ve got more projects than I can get to already.
———————————–
All the chattering aside, the work on the BOL will be eating up the majority of my time for a while. Somehow I’ll have to fit in the changeover to new tenants and all that entails at the rental house too. Got to keep that income stream flowing. That’s a backup too. And doing all the stuff around the house here, and the vehicle maintenance, and getting the kids started in the new school year…
Yeah. Don’t weaken. Don’t falter. Get ready. Stack.
nick
My ex-brother-in-law works (worked?) for a company based out of Orlando who builds, for lack of a better word, the sets used in DoD briefing and conference rooms around the country.
Too many repeat viewings of “Wargames”?
The actual room at Cheyenne Mountain doesn’t look like that at all. I saw the twin of that room which Raytheon used to maintain in Florida for software development purposes. “Boring beige” are the first words that spring to mind.
Little Rock could use a Buc-ee’s, but they probably aren’t as generous with the tax breaks in Arkansas.
Maybe The Beaver will build a store at the “Blue Oval City” exit. What’s one more tax break in that part of Tennessee.
Tough market. Wall Street is still hiring every C++ developer they can find. Stroustrup himself worked for one of the brokerages after his TAMU fiasco came to an end.
I still get calls for High Frequency Trading (essentially cheating) about once a month, but any office here is usually in town looking for a writeoff to justify the C-suite indulging in the party.
C++ is and isn’t a high performance language. A lot of crazy stuff can happen down in the bowels of the Standard Library unbeknownst to the developer.
The <limits> file in VS doesn’t have a SIZE_MAX macro defined?
The C++ standard is weird about supporting size_t. I learned that mixing C and C++ to implement a fast parallel file transfer object over ftp utilizing std::unique_ptr, stdio.h, and libcurl a few years ago.
@lynn:
You still use usenet? I thought StackExchange had replaced it for such things. Not that language lawyers aren’t a thing there, as well.
G.
GOING VIRAL: German Woman Drags Global Warming Idiot Off the Road by Her Hair – TWICE! (VIDEO)
Is attaching cowcatchers to the fronts of vehicles feasible? 😀
The wife’s nephew is hot to join the Army Futures command boondoggle here, with an HQ somewhere Downtown.
Looking at the public materials, it seems they have serious money to p*ss away -er- invest. The Army claims to be looking at solving their software costs problem by developing in house talent in project management and programming, but I wonder if the brass really has the interests of the Army and taxpayers as a high priority given the high cost of living here anymore.
Maybe I’d believe it based up in Temple/Belton, but CGI’s “onshore” delivery center and Federal practice have struggled in Belton.
The wonders of a $1 Trillion Defense Dept. budget.
The programming lead for the raffle prize handheld transceiver dropped through the letterbox today. An Amazon buy, but shipped via Postie. Now I need to extract digit and use it, to make the radio useable.
G.
Check your source file with an editor outside of VS. A stray UTF-8 character may be in there someplace.
I’ve seen that happen. The problem is spreading outside the Windows development ecosystem thanks to the Visual Studio Code Hot Skillz.
I need to extract digit
– took me a second…
Pretty hot and sunny here, with no relief in sight. FEMA national forecast has us clear and hot for the next three days at least.
Ate my breakfast, drinking my coffee. Couple more morning tasks and I’m on my way.
n
NB- I’m going to make some edits to my comments and any quotes of them to remove some references. It’s not YOU, I thought better of it…
The raffle prize transceiver works, although the plug covers have already broken. It’ll not be very useful, if at all in my use case, but it does work.
Unless I use the box for APRS, but I’ll need a TNC/tracker. Mobilink do one, and there’s a APRS app for Android. But APRSDroid is an orphan, and hasn’t been updated at all frequently to cope with more recent Android, since the developer (Georg Lukas, DO1GL) got fed up with “you’re destroying Amateur radio” comments – by charging $4.99 for it – and demands to implement “this obviously vital” capability. At no charge.
The second to latest issue of QST has a couple of articles about using APRS locally to support public events. Kinda interesting.
I think that might be your best use if the thing is that limited.
n
(yeah, there’s a lot of “you’re messing up my hobby” in the old and crusty contingent. And because of “old and crusty” there is a complete void when it comes to understanding how some of the very little things are a lot harder than they look. Like writing a book, or an article, looks easy until you actually try. After all, it’s just words, and “old and crusty” never stops spouting words.)
@nick:
I’m in the “old and crusty” group, but I remember that Amateur Radio is a very broad church – for instance, I’m not a contester. But I don’t wail on people who are.
I don’t subscribe to QST. Is their archive online?
G.
That’s why I stopped putting time into open source projects. A couple utilities or libraries that I wrote got enough use that people were requesting and then demanding updates. Right NOW. And a couple bigger projects that I contributed time to were clannish, for lack of a better word, and the old-timers were dismissive of submissions by new guys and offered no guidance beyond “RTFM!” when asked what the problem was … while the project leadership was putting out requests for people to join because they’re so understaffed.
A number of others say basically the same thing. I think that the number of developers and documentation writers who contribute to open source projects would more than double if not for entitlement and jerkishness.
It’s an understandable problem: someone contributes their time, and feels no need to put up with BS. However, they also want others to participate. Those other people need a way to get on board, and also want to feel valued…
Personally, I prefer to work alone, so I’m not hugely interested in contributing to other people’s projects.
You think it’s hot there?
106F today
108F Fri Sat & Sun
But it’s dry…
@ dkreck: I’ve been to Buck Owens Crystal Palace, but not this month.
Dry heat…
Current NOAA forecast for W.J. Fox airfield is:
106, 108, 110, 107, 105, 102, 102
I am looking forward to the ‘cool’ in a week, BTBH its the 20mph+ daily winds that make it special. Possible gusts to 40mph today.
OTOH, shorts and t shirt weather at 3am for some early morning testing of a new-to-me AT 80EDL (verdict: its a keeper!).
Yeah, that’s just freaking hot. I really do like the dry heat though.
Here in North Alabama, it’s 90F (forecast to reach 93 today) and 1,000,000% humidity. Soup is drier than our air.
What makes Texas bad is that most of the state has been dry since mid-June.
>> The programming lead for the raffle prize handheld transceiver dropped through the letterbox today.
>> I need to extract digit
– took me a second…
Same with “The programming lead…”
Wire, not person.
Huh? I bought beer just a couple of days ago.
On the plus side of no rain is no mosquitoes.
You know it’s dry when the prickly pear cactus are looking wrinkled. It’s not dry enough yet that cedar trees turn brown like a few years ago.
C++ is and isn’t a high performance language. A lot of crazy stuff can happen down in the bowels of the Standard Library unbeknownst to the developer.
All both of the modern Fortran compiler runtime libraries are based on C stdlib and C stdio.
You still use usenet? I thought StackExchange had replaced it for such things. Not that language lawyers aren’t a thing there, as well.
I got banned by the StackExchange moderators several years ago for asking difficult questions. I have not logged in in quite a few years.
Apparently you are not suppose to taunt the moderators.
The <limits> file in VS doesn’t have a SIZE_MAX macro defined?
The C++ standard is weird about supporting size_t. I learned that mixing C and C++ to implement a fast parallel file transfer object over ftp utilizing std::unique_ptr, stdio.h, and libcurl a few years ago.
Yes. I have a huge FEM template library that I got off the intertubes in an open source project. About 200 new objects. I am going to see if I can comment out the offending code for now, I don’t really need it until being in code converted from F77 to C++.
And size_t is a major screwup. size_t should always be the pointer size in my opinion. It is not. Been there, got the tshirt. OLE 2 on 64 bit Windows is a major sinner in these regards.
xkcd: Marshmallow
https://xkcd.com/2804/
No, no, no, no. When the capsule starts shimmying, it is too late.
Explained at:
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
Another example of the saying commonly attributed to George Bernard Shaw in about 1942, “Britain and America are two countries, divided by a common language”, although there is some evidence that a similar comment was made 60 years earlier by Oscar Wilde.
Regardless of which, in UK, “lead” is considered almost synonymous with “cable”, although there is some preference for lead as a loose, portable obect, whereas cable includes connotations of big, heavy, not so portable. That is the sense I was invoking. The Sundely programming cable I was using is no more than a foot or so long, and not very thick.
G.
BC: Baldness
https://www.gocomics.com/bc/2023/07/20
Wait, that is not baldness !
>> Another example of the saying commonly attributed to George Bernard Shaw in about 1942, “Britain and America are two countries, divided by a common language”, although there is some evidence that a similar comment was made 60 years earlier by Oscar Wilde.
Regardless of which, in UK, “lead” is considered almost synonymous with “cable”, although there is some preference for lead as a loose, portable obect, whereas cable includes connotations of big, heavy, not so portable. That is the sense I was invoking. The Sundely programming cable I was using is no more than a foot or so long, and not very thick.
30 cm??
I think that quote was actually a line of dialog from one of Charlie Chaplin’s early movies.
@alan:
The UK is somewhat schizophrenic in the matter of units. Food weights are metric, by government fiat, some building materials are metric, petrol (gasoline) is sold in metric units, but mileage is still in imperial units (miles per (Imperial) gallon).
Similarly, in common usage, Imperial and metric units are interchangeable, especially for older people. I was born and brought up before metrication, so I still routinely prefer to think in Imperial units, but I can use metric if required.
G,
Shades of the “Terminator”:
Story here and other places.
Imperial units are the way to go. Because it’s based on people and not the speed of light or some such nonsense the French made up.
My index finger, from tip to wrinkle joint is one inch and a bit. My feet, space the toe to toe stuff out and I can measure a room.
Yeah, sure. It’s not precise but I’m not using my finger to measure a woodcutting project. I hold the metric side of the ruler to me and nothing fits.
Decimalization (with a z or an s) seems like a good thing to me. But I never had to learn the whole pounds / shillings / tuppence etc system. What was that? Base 12? Ten fingers and two feet to count with? Must have been good enough to let England do the whole Empire on which the sun never set, so, not a bad system at all.
“Tesla Q2 storage deployments increase 222% as company navigates ‘fractured regulatory environment’”
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/tesla-energy-storage-solar-earnings/688474/
“The company’s solar deployments, however, declined year over year, which Tesla attributed to a high interest rate environment.”
Lot of utilities are buying commercial battery systems, hoping to buy or make power for cheap in the middle of the night and then resale that power (minus the 20% conversion to battery and back to electricity) for 10X during the day. That is why the battery systems are only sized for four hour runtimes.
“Energy Northwest, X-energy sign joint development agreement for up to 12 small modular reactors”
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/energy-northwest-x-energy-xe-100-nuclear-small-modular-reactor/688460/
“Energy Northwest expects to develop the 960 MW project at a site adjacent to the Columbia Generating Station and bring the first Xe-100 module online by 2030.”
I am hearing that there are 300 orders for the SMRs here in the USA once one starts operating. No reactor dome, limited space needed, fueled for five years at whack, no old fuel storage required, sounds like the perfect installation.
@paul:
Pounds/shillings/pence. 12 pence=1 shilling. 20 shillings=1 pound. Count pounds in decimal for larger amounts.
Yes, it was confusing, But after a year or three as a young child, it became automatic.
But it went away in 1981, in favour of pounds/new pence. 100 new pence=1 pound. Within a year or so, the “new” was forgotten. Old pre-decimal coinage was retained, but revalued. A 2 shilling coin became 10 pence, in value.
And we had £1 notes! Until HMG decided, in its semi-infinite wisdom, to replace them with £1 coins – bimetal, with a central disc of one metal, and an outer annulus of another metal. I’m unsure of the exact compositions. There have been several iterations of the £1 coin – the latest is 12-sided. We now also have a £2 coin of similar construction, but larger.
G.
“Biden DoD Lets Transgender Service Members Skip Deployments, Receive Indefinite Physical Fitness Waivers: Confidential Memo”
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/biden-dod-lets-transgender-service-members-skip-deployments-receive-indefinite-physical
Why am I not surprised ?
One crazy customer request I’ve been dealing with along those lines bothers me more than the others.
Life is definitely imitating art right now in really spooky ways.
“Earth To Become Inferno–Sky News”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/07/17/earth-to-become-inferno-sky-news/
We are all going to die !
I wonder if these policies can ever be reversed. Maybe Grand “Mother” the existing trannies. Have I mentioned how glad I am that I’m retired? Waivers of that nature would prevent promotion in the old days.
>> There have been several iterations of the £1 coin – the latest is 12-sided. We now also have a £2 coin of similar construction, but larger.
Canada does it better: Loonie and Twonie.
>> Canada does it better: Loonie and Twonie.
But then there’s poutine!
Maybe Grand “FAG” the existing trannies.
Fixed it for you.
I left the service at the end of 1979. I cannot imagine myself in the service and having to call spongey the commander-in-chief and realize that he is my ultimate boss. I cannot imagine being the service and having to share a room with a FAQ. I am not going to sugar coat it, I would refuse to share a room with a queer.
>> I am hearing that there are 300 orders for the SMRs here in the USA once one starts operating. No reactor dome, limited space needed, fueled for five years at whack, no old fuel storage required, sounds like the perfect installation.
And I am hearing they’re still looking for volunteers for the first site…maybe someone with an annoying neighbor??
Hmm, 98 F here, oh wait, that’s the water temp from the cold tap.
Air temp currently is 112.
FAG or frag?
Home safe from my pickup. Drove ok at 80mph, but the mpg dropped with the loaded trailer. Expy barely notices the trailer is there.
Something weird going on with my phone. Had the kid kill the samsung “bixby” personal assistant, that Iv’e never used, and that gets accidentally activated by one of the exterior buttons. Since then my battery life has plummeted. IDK if samsung cripples something when you kill their toy, or if kid accidentally or unknowingly changed something important.
Frustrating doesn’t begin to describe suddenly having to charge the phone during the day. I’ve never gone below 20% in a day before, and now it’s died once, and shut down the backlight today at 2% battery remaining.
Might have to do some googling.
n
I have not experienced that with my S21+
Had an interesting first visit with my new doctor Tuesday.
I picked him from the FLCCC website which lists doctors who actually care for patients, rather than follow the FDA/CDC/NIH/Pfizer narrative. Caring for patients, in this instance, means proactive treatment of covid patients rather than sending them home to get worse, and then putting them on ventilators, which kills them.
He’s a kidney doc, and he didn’t like my old labs, so he’s delving deeper there with more testing. I think he’s overreacting, but things he said during our visit will let me give him the benefit of the doubt. My old internist doc didn’t seem concerned, but the more I think about it, the more I think he only looked for reasons to write me new prescriptions, and I guess the kidneys weren’t doing it for him.
He was hesitant about my carnivore diet, but a strong proponent of keto and open-minded about intermittent fasting. He said high LDL cholesterol by itself is not reason to prescribe statins, and it’s more important to conquer inflammation first. My own prior research agrees with that 100%.
And he not only supported my refusal of the “vaccine”, he emphatically told me to continue to refuse it.
When I mentioned my lawsuit for being fired, he asked me if it was the lawsuit filed by [specific plaintiff]. He named her by name, and she’s the lead in the suit, and so he’s supportive of that, too.
I’m taking supplements to support immune health and weight loss, and he approved my list, except I need to cut my zinc back by half. When I mentioned my berberine, his eyes lit up and he said “Yes, Yes!”
I’m tentatively hopeful I’ve finally found a good fit.
Oh, I guess the best part is that he actually treated my like I was a patient in charge of my own healthcare, and he wanted to help me, rather than some stupid sack of meat he needed to order around.
@Geoff
UK decimalisation was in 1971 (not 1981). I remember, because my pint went from 1 shilling and 11 pence to 10p.
Hello, fellow “meater”.
When I was much younger and very broke, I would calculate most costs or payments in “six packs of beer”. I made $3.71 per hour, and that would buy 2 six packs.
I was a bit shocked to see ordinary canned beer at almost a dollar a can in the store last week. That used to be the price of tiny microbrew premium brands.
n
Cold welding, vacuum welding, vacuum cementing, fretting, etc.
Now “healing”, which is uniquely different how?
All part and parcel of the same poorly understood phenomena.
It will start with the engineers understanding it well enough to predict it–even if they have to develop a new dimensionless number to do it–then may eventually get sciency.
It may take a while. They’ve been able to predict turbulent fluid flow for nearly two centuries (thank you Sir George!) but are still waiting on the sciency part.
For any of you with small descendants in which you wish to encourage an inquiring mind, the bath is a fertile physics laboratory.
My favorite example: watching the water form a vortex when you pull the plug. Predict it, have them wait for it, show them how it spins one way and reestablishes that same way when the plug is replaced and removed. Then show them how to reverse it, and see if it stays reversed or re-establishes the same direction.
I was a bit shocked to see ordinary
canned beermass-produced swill at almost a dollar a can in the store last week.FIFY
It may take a while. They’ve been able to predict turbulent fluid flow for nearly two centuries (thank you Sir George!) but are still waiting on the sciency part.
George Stokes. It took the googles to remind me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_number
The unproven equations are the Navier–Stokes equations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier%E2%80%93Stokes_equations
One the guys in our Wednesday lunch bunch meeting of hams has a contract supporting a vacuum furnace. After he told me all the things that can break on it, I asked what it’s used for.
Apparently, you can deposit hard metal onto softer metal, and bond it and harden the deposited metal while leaving the hardness of the base level alone. They use it to make gate valves for the petroleum industry.
The bonding is not welding, the process is not case hardening, but that’s as close as I could get to understanding.
His explanation of the vacuum part was eaiser. If there’s oxygen, the heating elements burn up. Something about 40 V DC at 4000 Amps controled by SCRs and variable-reluctance transformers.
The unproven equations are the Navier–Stokes equations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier%E2%80%93Stokes_equations
BTW, the 2017 movie “Gifted” has a proof solved for the Navier-Stokes equations. And it is a cute movie. Highly recommended with Chris Evans, Octavia Spencer, and McKenna Grace.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gifted_(2017_film)
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/gifted_2017
I think that the office north side a/c unit just fried itself. The lights flickered and the breaker tripped. When I flip the breaker back on, it trips immediately. Not good. I now have a fan pointed into my office from the hallway. My a/c guy says maybe tomorrow. I am going out of town at noon. This sucks.
Hope it’s something simple and cheap.
n
Lynn; DO NOTHING for 30+ minutes. It’s possible that the breaker got so hot internally that it tripped. THEN reset it.
Canada does it better: Loonie and Twonie.
— so how do you tip the strippers? No tucking a Loonie under a g-string… asking for a friend… or do they start tipping with $5s?
n
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/8x2h2m/how_do_canadians_tip_strippers_without_one_dollar/
>> Scientists observed a metal healing itself, something never seen before.
I always remember our optician referring to Flexon eyeglass frames as “self-healing.”
https://www.flexon.com/
>> It’s not precise but I’m not using my finger to measure a woodcutting project.
I have one of these on my keychain, very handy:
https://www.acehardware.com/departments/tools/measure-and-marking-tools/tape-measures/2000842?x429=true&utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic-shopping&utm_campaign=organic-shopping
Now I am making a patch for a customer at 2am so I can go spend the weekend with Mom and Dad tomorrow in Port Lavaca. My mother will be 82 on Friday.
Dad and I are meeting in Victoria Friday afternoon to see the new Mission Impossible movie. I have it good terms that it is amazing.
Dadgum patchy software. Got so many patches on it that they blow out all the time. Patches on patches. Very fragile.
@lynn – maybe ‘time’ for this: https://timeleft.info/retirement-countdown-clock.html
Too many people living off me. The daughter would kill my savings in 5 to 10 years.
“I’ve lived in a van full-time for 3 years. Here are the 5 biggest downsides no one talks about.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/van-life-biggest-downsides-no-one-talks-about-2023-7?r=US&IR=T&utm_source=pocket-newtab
And those are definitely downsides. I wonder where the toilet is ?
@paulthemanc:
Oops. Mea culpa.
G.
Insider. “edited for length and clarity”.
And honesty.
You’ll own nothing and be happy.
Except the $100 Spanx leggings on her and what I’m guessing is a $40 Coal beanie on him.
I’m not thrilled with the future which our “betters” have planned for us. They’re still in the “sell” phase, however.
I follow Bob Wells’ channel on YouTube for the DIY solar system info, but he has some interesting interviews with people who really do live in vans full time.