59F and wet this am. Got a bit of misty drizzle last night, just enough to wet the deck. The NOAA forecast called for rain. I got a few drops while driving around, but mainly nothing. It’s incredible to me that their forecast was super dependable for better than a year, but now it has been mostly wrong for months. There was a notable change in the graphics they were producing, I wonder what else changed at that time.
Non-prepping hobby club this am, then kid’s sportsball game, so i’ll check back later.
In the mean time, What did you do to prep this week?
n
I don’t know what the forecast was, but in Bastrop I got just under 1/2 inch of rain, mostly in a slow drizzle.
The new Florida Governor has been busy. This never would have happened under the Socialist. Even Rick Scott was too concerned about his Senate run to make the move.
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/politics/fl-ne-ron-desantis-scott-israel-decision-20190110-story.html
News item about 10% layoffs st SpaceX. I’m going to request a refund and cancellation of my $5 million trip to Pluto.
News item about 10% layoffs st SpaceX. I’m going to request a refund and cancellation of my $5 million trip to Pluto.
What! I had to pay $7.5 million for my trip! Musk must be raycisss! Oh, wait …
The SpaceX layoff is a bit strange. I would have thought that their launch business was profitable by now, or nearly so. Meanwhile, they are starting a whole pile of other project, for which I would have thought they needed all hands on deck. Are they somehow in financial trouble? Is this actually just an excuse to clear deadwood? Or something else?
Took a package to DHL on Friday, to mail from Germany to the UK. Today, it was sent back to our return address. According to their AGB, sending a bottle of whisky internationally is no problem. According to the customer service agent I had on the phone, whisky is flammable, and therefore forbidden in international air shipments. Which must come as a surprise to all of the whisky companies that do mail-order and send by DHL. Dunno what the truth is, nor do I have any great idea what to do next…
Leave me out of this.
The SpaceX layoff is a bit strange. I would have thought that their launch business was profitable by now, or nearly so. Meanwhile, they are starting a whole pile of other project, for which I would have thought they needed all hands on deck. Are they somehow in financial trouble? Is this actually just an excuse to clear deadwood? Or something else?
The manned flights of Dragon have been delayed into 2020. I don’t believe they will receive payment from NASA for the commercial crew flight program until then.
Apparently, the problem involves getting certifications from NASA, and I have no doubt that is related to Boeing’s problems meeting the schedule for Starliner, the company’s Dragon counterpart.
I’m sure NASA would also like to get their only Block I Orion/SLS launch done (June 2020, unmanned, tentatively) before SpaceX and Boeing start their regular manned flights, if, for no other reason than to justify the expense of renovating then throwing away the Ares tower. It will be less embarrassing when they pull the plug on the internal programs or, at a minimum, scale back to one launch every few years. “Despite the enormous success of the initial flight, after careful review, we at NASA have concluded…”
” “Despite the enormous success of the initial flight, after careful review, we at NASA have concluded…””
Dang man, it’s like you do it for a living….
Home from hobby, and from sportsball….
Beautiful clear blue sky, with a mild wind. Humidity came down to 56%RH so hopefully things start drying out. I’m taking down decor and working in the driveway. No sales today, I’m being strong….
n
As predicted.
Again, he no habla Espanol.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/julian-castro-announcement-2020-white-house-bid-candidate-for-president-today-views-stance-issues-age-live-updates-01-12-2019/
The wife no longer listens to me. I have told her several times to stay out of north Houston on any day. She left for Lewisville, Texas (300+ miles north) at 10am. She just called me at 1250pm saying that she was sitting in non-moving traffic 50 miles north of here and for me to look up the traffic conditions. I looked at http://www.Transtar.com and found out that the I-45 freeway is closed at the Woodlands for construction. I told her to head east when she could at the tollway 99 interchange.
Sigh. If she would go the way that I go, up the I-99 tollway, out hwy 290 to hwy six, and then north on a 40 mile country road, she would be in Madisonville now, 150 miles north of here. Sigh.
37 years of marriage as of last Wednesday and for some reason, she will not listen to my advice anymore. I am really perturbed by this. She will now be heading into Dallas in the dark and she is having trouble seeing at night. Sigh.
And we forgot to get a tolltag for her new Highlander. I wonder if they will bill the temporary tag on her SUV ?
59F and wet this am. Got a bit of misty drizzle last night, just enough to wet the deck. The NOAA forecast called for rain. I got a few drops while driving around, but mainly nothing. It’s incredible to me that their forecast was super dependable for better than a year, but now it has been mostly wrong for months. There was a notable change in the graphics they were producing, I wonder what else changed at that time.
We got about an inch of rain last night judging by the pool. Maybe an inch and a half.
News item about 10% layoffs st SpaceX. I’m going to request a refund and cancellation of my $5 million trip to Pluto.
I wonder if Musk uses the GE school of management. Lay off the bottom ranked 10% of employees every year. It is a horrible way to manage.
And we forgot to get a tolltag for her new Highlander. I wonder if they will bill the temporary tag on her SUV ?
The system may have to send the temp tag for manual review, but the billing will catch up. The cameras are really good as of late, with even better/scarier video tech in the works, but you want the tag for discount reasons if nothing else.
I wonder if Musk uses the GE school of management. Lay off the bottom ranked 10% of employees every year. It is a horrible way to manage.
Gwynne Shotwell is the hands on exec at SpaceX and has a history of mostly aerospace jobs. No GE-style management training in her background unless they did something weird at Chrysler in the Chairman Lee era.
One of our product delivery managers is ex-SpaceX management. His project is en fuego at the moment, but the problem is the customer’s weird demands.
She left for Lewisville, Texas (300+ miles north) at 10am. She just called me at 1250pm saying that she was sitting in non-moving traffic 50 miles north of here and for me to look up the traffic conditions.
Install Waze on her phone. I’m not a big app guy, but I do use Waze, Google Maps, and OsmAnd freeware. I also generally don’t drive long distances in Texas without a backup Android device containing a cached map of the entire state as well as a current paper map from Travel Texas.
Not listening. Try being married to a doctor, especially after Doh-bamacare kicked in and the whole world had to hedge their bets in case they needed help in a SHTF moment in their lives.
Install Waze on her phone.
I need to do that. She does not like for me to touch her phone since I last tried to help her do something on it. So, it will be another battle. It took me two years to buy her the Highlander, that was a battle royale.
Not listening. Try being married to a doctor, especially after Doh-bamacare kicked in and the whole world had to hedge their bets in case they needed help in a SHTF moment in their lives.
Oh gosh, doctors and lawyers are the worst. They are worse than engineers (snicker !).
“Software patents poised to make a comeback under new patent office rules”
https://www.osnews.com/story/129095/software-patents-poised-to-make-a-comeback-under-new-patent-office-rules/
Not again please.
The NOAA forecast called for rain. I got a few drops while driving around, but mainly nothing. It’s incredible to me that their forecast was super dependable for better than a year, but now it has been mostly wrong for months. There was a notable change in the graphics they were producing, I wonder what else changed at that time.
It is my understanding that most of the NOAA people are furloughed also. Whoever was doing the crest prediction on the Brazos River sucked also since they were under by 1.4 ft. The river has dropped six feet since yesterday so we are doing well now. It was getting worrisome there for a while.
https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?wfo=HGX&gage=RMOT2
software patents – yeah – great. Ask basically anyone in the software world; we all think the idea is idiotic. So who pushes for the things?
I know, I know…
software patents – yeah – great. Ask basically anyone in the software world; we all think the idea is idiotic. So who pushes for the things?
I know, I know…
Pray that Oracle loses the case over the copyright of the Java API.
I had a discussion about this subject with a couple of intellectual property lawyers following a grad school seminar one afternoon. If copyright applies to APIs, all hell is going to break lose.
I suggested that all the clone makers will owe IBM a check if APIs are eligible for copyright. One lawyer countered with a scenario for a bigger potential payday for AT&T with the classic C API.
A lawyer!
Rent seeking is a characteristic of the ruling class, and of a sclerotic society….
They will squeeze the golden goose so hard it suffocates.
n
They will squeeze the golden goose so hard it suffocates.
I saw that on the West Coast with the Chinese relations and their rentier skims.
Too many idiot cousins to support from the rackets. Even 1 in 3, as is the case in that family, is a bad ratio.
One uncle owns the Redmond Kinder Kare building. He was merciless squeezing them for money, but Kinder Kare is a rentier skim of its own for their shareholders so I have no clue who to root for in that situation.
I just assume that my mother-in-law’s Seattle rental has already been signed over to one of the Number One Sons — Oh, yes, that is a thing beyond “Charlie Chan” movies.
Rent seeking is a characteristic of the ruling class, and of a sclerotic society….
They will squeeze the golden goose so hard it suffocates.
Old word but I forgot the meaning:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sclerotic
Yes, they will.
My prepping this week consisted of replacing the TP and writing the date on the empty core. How else to get beyond “a roll a week” guessing?
It’s amazing how fast the last 3/8ths of an inch on the roll goes. Scott 1000 sheet rolls. It seems to be rolled “fluffy” for the last half inch to the core.
Not a very exciting prepping activity. But you asked.
My prepping this week consisted of replacing the TP and writing the date on the empty core. How else to get beyond “a roll a week” guessing?
I bought two more Charmin TP 45 roll packs at Sam’s Club to bring my stash back to 7 or 8. And I bought a Bounty pack of paper towels to bring my stash back to 4 or 5.
Of course the Bezos’ divorce will affect the stock. AMZN is tied to The Legend of Bezos, the family man with a crazy laugh who drove an Accord, bought a lifetime supply of the shirts he wore daily, and sat down every morning at a desk made from a door and filing cabinets. The wife famously drove the truck which carried the couple from DE Shaw to Seattle so Bezos could work on the Amazon business plan from the passenger seat.
All BS.
Apparently, Bezos is the largest investigation ever undertaken by the Enquirer. God only knows where some of the stuff originates. We probably don’t want to know what’s available on anyone for the right price.
https://nypost.com/2019/01/10/bezos-divorce-has-amazon-shareholders-wondering-whats-next/
TP is a critical store, esp if you have females in the household! You must stack it high. What better barter item too, aside from its bulk?
Better stash some tampons too- get the EXACT SAME ONES as currently in use. EXACT!
n
(with OFD gone, I sometimes feel the need for a vocab word… I did have to check the spelling)
Just winding down. Had a campfire tonight. Roasted hotdogs and did s’mores.
Kids are singing along to itunes, but I got too cold.
Facetimed with grandma while sitting around the fire. Sometimes we really do live in the future.
n
“Stranger Things”: season two
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranger_Things
and
https://www.netflix.com/title/80057281
and
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/stranger_things/
I just binge watched season two of “Stranger Things” on Netflix. Freaking awesome. Scared the you know what out of me again. Great story and very well acted.
Wow, the 1985 setting was well done also. The music, cars and clothing were excellent.
I hope that season three is as good. It comes out July 4, 2019.
BTW, “Stranger Things” is kind of a cross between “The Goonies” and the “Alien” movies with a strong touch of Stephen King. You have been warned.
Sean Astin came in and did an awesome job. I cannot believe that they …
My rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Rotten Tomatoes: 95% and 94%
Better stash some tampons too- get the EXACT SAME ONES as currently in use. EXACT!
Aw, jeeze. When I was in HS my sisters and Mom were on the same cycle. About 12 hours apart… I could smell it the day before. Mom would buy a box of OB brand. No clue if it is still made. But a big box. And everyone, err, the females, would use one and take two or three. Because whoever used the last one had to go to the store and buy more. With Mom’s money.
I had fun. I found their stashes. Dad was clueless and was pretty much WTF is /this/ doing in the silverware drawer. Then you have Dad ranting and cussing but it wasn’t anything he could blame on me. I’m cool. 🙂
Yeah, it was a “use one, take three” game and then I started taking three every time I went pee and scattered them around the house. Down in the sofa cushions. In their pillow cases. And swiped my sister’s stashes. Well, they were already crazy, what’s a bit more?
Anyway, whatever the ladies say they use, double the number at a minimum. Minimum.
Wow, the 1985 setting was well done also. The music, cars and clothing were excellent.
The first 40 minute or so of JJ Abrams “Super 8” works as a nostalgia trip, and that was probably the inspiration for “Stranger Things”. The movie is more “Spielberg” than what the man himself has managed to produce for the last three decades.
As for the rest of the movie? It ends up being as disappointing as the 1990 “It”, and for *exactly* the same reason. Maybe JJ was making that point.
Install Waze on her phone.
I need to do that. She does not like for me to touch her phone since I last tried to help her do something on it. So, it will be another battle. It took me two years to buy her the Highlander, that was a battle royale.
Something that might help her is to stuff contacts/addresses into her account. I use Apple contacts, but just drop them onto my Google tab and they live in both gardens. Apple maps works pretty good using Siri “Hey Siri, take me to Lynn’s house” and it just pops up. I imagine Android phones work just as good with “OK Google.” I put all our destinations in the contact manager before MrsAtoz and I go out on a gig. Very convenient. I also check each location on the desktop to make sure they look right before leaving. More than once Apple maps on the Mac shows a location in the middle of nowhere. Google maps is more up to date.
Google maps is more up to date.
Apple Maps churns through a lot of people here in Austin. We see resumes where I work because they use a lot of C++ in the app’s data models.
Apple has no choice about developing their own database, but Google has the “first mover” advantage both in terms of talent and acquisitions (notably Waze).
Google will change things for no reason, and break them.
I finally got in the habit of just saying “ok google, show me a map of 123 main st, anytown” when I discovered that if you say “ok google NAVIGATE to 123 main” it would open the map, and start the nav app, without any more touches. Very convenient while driving.
Then for no reason, it started only showing me PUBLIC TRANSIT routes when I say “navigate” and they usually fail, because there isn’t a route.
NOW I have to say “navigate by CAR” to get the whole thing to work.
HeII, for a while it would only pop up UBER when I asked it to navigate. I never installed Uber, don’t want uber, and I especially don’t want that cr@p inserted (and breaking) something I use every day. I had to delete uber to fix that issue.
You can say, “navigate to nearest Parkland store” and depending on the point of interest it can work like magic. You have to be careful though, if the entry it finds on the web is the Corporate office, it might route you to another state….. even if you are a block from the local franchise.
n
anything out of town, I still turn on my garmin as a sanity check.
anything out of town, I still turn on my garmin as a sanity check.
I use OsmAnd from F-Droid as the map app on my spyware-free phone and as a sanity check on my chock-full-of-Google-spyware mainstream Android device.
On iOS, I use HERE maps as a sanity check on Waze.
As stated previously, we don’t leave town without the Travel Texas map. I request a new one every year or so.
Garmin in FL does strange things like route Tampa to Ft. Lauderdale through Clewiston and send people to Lakeland from Clearwater on 60. The latter is just a minor time inconvenience, but Clewiston is … lets leave it at interesting.
The worst google maps ever screwed me up was in Central Florida. I was in a hurry, put in the address, printed the resulting map and directions and hit the road…
About 1030 that night, while driving around in pine forest and swamp for a couple of hours, but still not reaching our destination, I looked more closely at the map….
Google used to have a really bad habit. If it couldn’t find an address, instead of telling you that in BIG RED LETTERS, it would cheerfully give you directions to the lat/lon coordinates of the CENTER OF THE ZIP CODE. So I got to explore central Florida at night, with my fiance’ patiently in the seat next to me, as we tried to start a vacation together…
After that, I never trusted google maps fully again.
n
I had fun. I found their stashes. Dad was clueless and was pretty much WTF is /this/ doing in the silverware drawer. Then you have Dad ranting and cussing but it wasn’t anything he could blame on me. I’m cool.
Yeah, it was a “use one, take three” game and then I started taking three every time I went pee and scattered them around the house. Down in the sofa cushions. In their pillow cases. And swiped my sister’s stashes. Well, they were already crazy, what’s a bit more?
Dude, you are lucky that your sisters did not use a cattle prod on your nether regions.
Dude, you are lucky that your sisters did not use a cattle prod on your nether regions.
They never figured it out. They were too busy accusing each other of “taking the last one” from the box.
I don’t talk to my sisters anymore. After what they did to Mom, they can burn forever.
No, the first manned test flight is set for this summer. The unmanned flight for this month has been delayed due to the shutdown.
Orion has nothing to do with crew transfer to ISS, that mission was dropped years ago. It has a very different set of design criteria than Dragon 2 and Starliner.
Orion launches on SLS, which is only planned on launching every two years at best.
Lynn, when partners stop listening it’s usually time for a divorce.
And women become furious if you mention it.
I still have a really good nose. I strongly suspected someone at work was pregnant two weeks before she announced it. My comment of “I wondered who it was” caused butt-hurt.
We’re built to smell it….
n
Lynn, when partners stop listening it’s usually time for a divorce.
No freaking way. She almost has me broke in.