Hot and humid. Got some rain in the afternoon yesterday which cooled things down a bit, depending on what part of town you were in. The area around the BOL reported about 4 inches in one hour… lots of regional and local variation in weather in the Lonestar state. I got a lot while driving around, but almost nothing at home.
Spent the morning poking at my non-prepping hobby club website. Learned some things. Got good tech support from both hosts, voice with india at homestead.com and chat with [somewhere probably not the USA] at bluehost.com. Both addressed my immediate issues although bluehost did a bunch of stuff without asking or telling me what he was doing. I had to figure it out afterwards. (he cleared my 301 redirects, and one of them was still needed.)
There are a lot of quirks in the whole, domain registrar/internet hosting service/SSL issuers/wordpress landscape. I’ve got one external link that gets a “/” appended to it, which breaks it. Dunno if it’s wordpress or my browser “helping” but it only happens with that one link. Had to add a trailing space to the xxxxx.pdf link to keep it from happening. And when I uploaded the xxx_xxx_xxx.pdf to my file system at the host, (to avoid having to have the external link and getting the security warning) something stripped out the “_”s in the file name which I didn’t notice, which broke the linking… found that and added them back in to fix it.
And after straightening out the residual redirects at the old host, I eventually discovered that somehow the old site had one nameserver changed to bluehost. A script must have done it when I changed the nameservers for the subdomain that I eventually transferred to the new host, bluehost… that’s been screwing me up since the change, I just didn’t know what was screwing me. Hopefully today everything will have propagated.
Because last night the site didn’t work at all on old IE. No idea why. Don’t really care, but someone might still be using it. Works fine on Firefox on windows and mint linux. And mostly works on chromium on linux.
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During my troubleshooting I was running tracert and noticed that the second hop outbound is always followed by 3 or 4 timeouts before it continues. I think ATT fiber, which is really good old lightspeed.sbcglobal.net underneath, has an issue somewhere…
1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms dsldevice.attlocal.net [192.168.1.254] 2 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 172-14-48-1.lightspeed.hstntx.sbcglobal.net [172 .14.48.1] 3 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 71.149.23.112 4 * * * Request timed out. 5 * * * Request timed out. 6 * * * Request timed out. 7 7 ms 7 ms 7 ms 32.130.16.255 8 * * * Request timed out. 9 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms 141.101.74.203 10 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms host77.ipowerweb.com [66.235.2xx.xxx] The 7th hop is always the same to the 4th quad then more hops... and there are usually several timeouts before it finally starts working toward the destination. Something regional at both ends that is broken?? They may still have sites down from the storms, they have temp gennies still connected to boxes in nearby neighborhoods. ------------- I am learning things. I wish I wasn't. I've got plenty else to do. And today, I'm doing my civic duty and reporting for jury service. City of Houston courts this time. The summons says it will take all day and to bring a lunch. Joy. But that's part of being a good citizen, participating in the process. I just have a particular aversion to stripping off all my weapons and tools and then walking around downtown. Oh well. We'll see how it goes. While I'm reading a book in the jury room, y'all should be stacking so you don't end up lacking... nick
The private key is embedded in the token and not going anywhere.
When you plug in the token, run ‘ifconifg’ in a separate Window and see if the OS configures a new network interface. A USB-NIC wouldn’t surprise me.
The sbcglobal.net DSL infrastructure is still there behind the fiber.
SBC built “AT&T” by acquiring Ameritech, BellSouth, and what was left of legacy ‘T’ after old AT&T lost its nerve in the face of WorldCom becoming the darling of Wall Street and spun off what is now Comcast.
Bernie Ebbers deserved whatever he got nightly in prison for all the lives and careers he ruined.
Washington State in a nutshell.
My wife’s American cousins are on that level of selfish, but the family doesn’t have the kind of money which would allow theft on that scale.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaXE907M6-A
Friday’s poster child represented Austin. Her monthly take home is more than my wife made in private practice here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dn7QJ1O2r70
Getting ready to head out. Coffee and bacon on board. Have to pack a special bag without any prohibited items in it…
And lunch.
n
I got excused from jury duty due to my age. If I had attended, I would not have been able to take much of anything. All electronics were prohibited, including smart watches and airtags. Any sharp objects were naturally not allowed. Really quite restrictive.
I gave serious thought to serving on the federal district court jury. But memories of fighting those 30 miles of traffic, going and coming, and sitting in a court room while wanting to jump up and ask obvious questions, while probably having to pee, just did not excite me anymore.
TSLA earnings this afternoon after the bell. What’s today’s distraction from Tony?
The Cameron County website doesnt show that the beach or Hwy 4 are closed so it won’t happen in Boca Chica.
Politics? AI move by X or Tesla?
In the jury pool. Naturally my guts are churning today when my bathroom access is limited…
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rained this am. Quite heavily in places if the street flooding is an indication.
N
Director Cheeto resigned. I guess she’s going to take the fall.
In a year, she will be on the payroll of another subsidiary of Vanguard/Blackrock.
Finally. She was given the “or else” order from Obola. I wonder if the Doritos will really be safe.
Did plugs have a stroke in Vegas?
The LSM has gone all in with The Kamel. Non-partisan my arse. Remember the primaries where everybody trashed her? Less than 1%, now the LSM says she “will save Democracy.” I guess plugs failed. There’s no surprise there. Her polling is way too high, and I suspect rigging. I already hear the raycisss card hitting the floor.
I just downloaded my next Rick H read, The Forgotten Winchester. But, I will continue to check in here.
Still no juries called. Admin says we will probably come back after lunch, atleast for a while.
It’s class d misdemeanor court, fines, no jail, mostly traffic violations. And they must be pleading down and settling.
N
Hang them all?
Sorry, a little gallows humour there, from one who is permanently disqualified from jury duty. Good luck.
When passing around the bottle at the weekly gathering, the Wine Moms want to be able to discuss their chosen candidate as the President who will finally “transcend politics” in the White House.
Not that it really matters, but that sounds like a smart thing to say after a couple of glasses of Pinot.
Or gummies depending on legalization status in that state:
Well dang, I like Doritos.
I guess I should take Nick’s advice & start stacking.
In the meantime we will just have to hope they don’t assign her to a warehouse with a sloped roof.
Vanguard/Blackrock will find another place to park her with restricted stock units for a couple of years to pad out her pension.
I woke up today, and The Kamel is the Dumbo nominee. Am I in a dream? I can’t wait to hear plugs’ speech tomorrow about how great she is. He is better at debating with all his ailments than her. Really, Dumbos? Her?
I just watched Ray’s Europe2022 mp4. Very nice. Thank you for sharing it.
Just putting this here:
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/crying-havoc
Home from my jury summons. Nobody was called to be a juror. 8 or 9 courts and none of the people with lawyers ended up asking for a jury trial.
Oh well, got some reading done.
Looks like more rain this afternoon or evening, some light spatter coming down between downtown and here.
n
I’ve decided to buy a whole house generator. I initially looked at Generac as they seem to be everywhere. I also joined the Facebook Generac Group.
That group had lots of complaints about failures following the recent Texas hurricane. The generators wouldn’t start, transfer switches failed, engines failed after a short run, and generators broke but the engine would still run. Many tales of woe and long waits for parts and repairs. Often the story started with how they often regularly tested the generator’s ability to start.
Many of the problems could have been avoided if the owner had done real testing. A test that starts the engine is nothing more than an engine and startup battery test. A real test would drop the power the transfer switch, and after starting then carry the whole house load for an over an hour.
It seems to me that when the power company warns of a regional power overload, those with generators could be good neighbors and switch to the generator for several hours while verifying the capability of their system.
When I ran computer centers with backup power for the Air Force, we would test at least once annually by using the back up for most of a shift.
The long delays for service and parts are not a good sign. I contacted my local Kohler dealer and ordered a 20KW system. When I was given the price of $1899 for a new 250-gallon propane tank I found a used one for $250. Now I have to move it but it only weighs about 600 pounds and I have a car trailer with a winch and a back hoe to help load and unload it.
Until the gas company shuts down service to the neighborhood as they did for several hours at the height of the storm in Leander during the Feb. 2021 freeze event in Central Texas.
Since Leander is heavy on ex-military retirees, I’m guessing that the “unprecedented” demand curve cited by the gas company for initiating the shutdown was due to generators kicking in as ERCOT rolled blackouts across the area.
When I bought a 250-gal propane tank for my new generator, they lifted the tank off the truck with a small crane, and put it on the driveway. To get it to the proper location, they rolled it into place using a half-dozen 4 inch PVC pipe segments as rollers. Low-tech, but worked perfectly.
All well and good in theory, but that much propane is expensive. My monthly electric bill peaks at about $350. A full tank of propane costs (last winter) about $500, and that much propane will run my generator for a max of 4 days.
We do not have natural gas so I’ll be on propane.
My monthly electric bill peaks at about $220 in the winter.
“Hey Joe, if you have some free time, the Corvette needs a wash and wax.”
A full tank of propane costs (last winter) about $500, and that much propane will run my generator for a max of 4 days.
– wow, that’s all you get? Worth knowing …
Now my BOL neighbor calling the propane guys for a quick refill, and her anxiety level, makes sense.
n
I foolishly bought a larger generator than I needed, so it uses more propane than I would like. But if I ever get more power-hungry appliances, I know I’ll be able to power them. Lessons learned.
My thinking, which could be wrong, would be to have a generator that can run your heat-pump plus oh, 2000 watts or so for silly things like lighting and the fridge and freezer and the water well pump.
Yeah. If you have an electric range, turn off the heat pump while cooking. Then again, i f you have gas, you’d have a gas stove.
Oh yeah. And have a wood stove or pellet stove so you never need the electric heat from your central air.
The plus side is that your generator is not working its ass off, but sort of loafing. That will make it last longer.
Pellet stoves need a/c for their fans and pellet feed motors (tho I know of one gravity feed / natural convection model).
My ancient Whitfield pulls about 300W.
My backup is several 100AH batteries & an inverter for short outages (eventually with a solar charging option), then a 2200W (1800 actual) dual fuel gennie, after that Kerosene heaters…
A lot of jurisdictions have banned new installs of wood burning stoves and fireplaces.
@Lynn – I noticed today on Indeed.com that SpaceX has ads up for jobs doing embedded C++ development on Starlink firmware out in Bastrop.
If you need somewhere to send Number One Son until the economy recovers, Bastrop is on the Houston side of Austin. He would have to get an apartment during the week, but that would strictly be a crash pad.
Yeah, I was out on Indeed when I got home. Our employee surveys came back at work and one of the Colonist demographic cr*pped on our direct manager pretty badly. Normally, that demographic fronts as if they are scared of their own shadows, and, as the only old white guy in the group, I can’t help but feel the suspicion falls on me as being the culprit.
No, I didn’t do it. I have my issues with the company but not with my immediate management.
Ban away.
Tonight’s movie is Waterworld. I’m half an hour in and so far it makes the Mad Max films with Tina Turner seem real.
Ok. All of the polar ice has melted and there is almost no dry land left. I’ll go with that for a moment.
It’s been at least a few hundred years since everything melted…. and they still have things like jet skies….. and some folks have developed gills. Huh?
How does this all work if there is no land for silly things like making gasoline? Much less, jet skies wear out…
Never mind I read somewhere, some when, that if Antarctica and the North Pole both totally melted, the sea level would rise about 6 inches. Houston would have a problem.
All of the folks are white or oriental. I suppose it must be true that our african brothers can’t swim. (joke, ok)
I’m going to finish watching this dreck. I might get better. I might be deluded.
Details for Dummies would be greatly appreciated.
I meant Junior Senior Programmer.
“Waterworld” is huge IP for Kabletown thanks to the stunt show at Universal Studios Hollywood.
If you’ve ever seen “Svengoolie” on Saturday nights, one of the new-ish members of the cast, Gwengoolie, was the female lead in the stunt show for many years.
I don’t want to boast, not much to it, I am no electrician. Parallel battery connectors from Amazon, 4 LeFePo4 batteries, a cheapo 500W inverter from Amazon with 2x 110V outlets (and a USB outlet or two).
The idea is that I can put it all on a garden cart & wheel it around as necessary. Take it outside to charge for example, take it inside to run the pellet stove. Enough power to run 8 hours continuous.
TBH I have no idea where the inverter & cables are, after “cleaning up” the garage a couple of months ago. And I haven’t tested the all up run-to-shutdown time (the batteries have a maintenace controller) time or all up charge-from-near-dead time. It was a proof of concept thing last fall that I really need to get back to. Fusing should be included. A better & bigger inverter. A charge level indicator. Timer? What about grounding?
I need a better charger, thinking a Victron which can do solar and float on house current as well. Then real solar panels (dirt cheap around here).
I am leery of charging batteries in or near the house.
So I need a place with sun visibility that I can secure & maybe even camouflage with house power. Should be legal. Don’t want to feed the grid.
Too many projects.
THAT is certainly true; we get power failures every other month, generally lasting 5-10 minutes. It runs more during its twice-a-month test cycles, which are 5 minutes each.
The private key is embedded in the token and not going anywhere.
When you plug in the token, run ‘ifconifg’ in a separate Window and see if the OS configures a new network interface. A USB-NIC wouldn’t surprise me.
Nope, no such beastie.
@paul, sorry we didn’t warn you off Waterworld. It was pretty universally panned iirc. I did watch it but don’t remember much. Someone steals something and the mcguffin is hiding in plain sight…
n
Shouldn‘t that be ipconfig?
I woke up today, and The Kamel is the Dumbo nominee. Am I in a dream? I can’t wait to hear plugs’ speech tomorrow about how great she is. He is better at debating with all his ailments than her. Really, Dumbos? Her?
It may be Mark Kelly: “Democrats Selected DIFFERENT Nominee Than Kamala Harris, Forced Biden Out With Threats of 25th Amendment”
https://www.infowars.com/posts/democrats-selected-different-nominee-than-kamala-harris-forced-biden-out-with-threats-of-25th-amendment/
@paul, sorry we didn’t warn you off Waterworld. It was pretty universally panned iirc. I did watch it but don’t remember much. Someone steals something and the mcguffin is hiding in plain sight…
n
Hey, I like Waterworld !
When I ran computer centers with backup power for the Air Force, we would test at least once annually by using the back up for most o f a shift.
When I was at TXU, we started all 60 ??? of our generators across the system, 1 MW to 2 MW, on their black start batteries and ran them for an hour after synchronizing to the grid every week. That cut the start failure rate to almost zero.
Our big problem was black starting our plants. Even the one that had five of the 2 MW locomotive supercharged V12 diesels (2,500 hp) had some trouble starting the 3,000 hp electric boiler feed pump motor. Our steam driven boiler feed pumps on the newer plants had the separate problem of getting steam if all the units were down and the common steam header was empty and cold.
Texas has not had a real blackout since the late 1950s on a very cold winter day. Hopefully we will keep it that way.
>>A lot of jurisdictions have banned new installs of wood burning stoves and fireplaces.
Just another ‘day one’ EO for OHB to sign. “Burn Baby Burn”
Lost power for a while there… it was only our block. I walked to the end of the block and the fuse at the top of the pole that feeds our street was open. Took about 1 hour for the guys to come and reset it.
I sat out on the swing and read with a tiny little fire while it was dark. Several of my neighbors have generators that I didn’t know about. One even runs his landscape lighting on it. I guess “whole house” is whole house… but it it visible from several blocks away and a bit of a thumb in the eye for neighbors that don’t have power. I’d avoid it just for that reason.
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And I need to make some progress on my generator projects.
n
No one mentioned this yet??
Hydrothermal Explosion at Yellowstone Causes Tourists to Panic, Park Officials Close Biscuit Basin (VIDEO)
Caught on video..
n
ifconfig is interface configuration
OK, grandmas and eggs… Depends on whether you are a penguinista or a defenstrator. Same function, different name…
G.
ifconfig does not even exist.