Cool but no rain in the forecast for a couple of days. Maybe we’ll finally dry out. I’ve had standing water in the driveway for 3 days, which is why I’ve said it’s “damp”. Stuff doesn’t dry out because the humidity is so high.
Beautiful day yesterday. I got the Christmas decor mostly down. I cleaned up the dog mess in the back yard. TWO full bags (plastic grocery type) and I’m not sure I got it all. I’ve been slack. I’m sure the dog thinks of me as “The Poop Thief”.
Got to the chiropractor, and am back in normal condition. I’ll probably try for one more visit on Sunday, when the doc I like is in my local store. He recommended some stretching… so I guess I’d better.
I’ve got some auction pickups today, and a bunch of stuff to prep for sale. I need to either move some of my stuff from Craigslist to another selling app, or set up a facecrook account just for FB marketplace. I haven’t gotten ANY hits on my craigslist stuff. I expected the flammables cabinet would sell in a week, but it hasn’t. (It’s a small one Lynn, or I’d offer it to you.) I’ll keep it rather than send it to auction and sell it for nothing. If I’m gonna keep it, I need to get it out of my driveway.
Finally got a break with my wife and the bathroom/saferoom remodel. By moving the safe, I think we have a plan to move forward with a floorplan I can work from. It solves a couple of issues at the same time to move it, and moving forward is good. Now I just need to fit that work in with all the rest of my stuff. Time to crank up the effort, and get any work done before it starts getting warm again. It was already warm in the attic today putting the Christmas stuff away.
Time is flying already, with #2 daughter starting basketball soon, and piano lessons moving to a weeknight. I’m going to be doing more kid shuffling than last year. Jeez, I’ve got stuff I need to get DONE and off my plate… swim team will be starting before I know it.
And with that, I SPRING into action………….
n
Chickens coming home to roost? Payback? Housecleaning? Message? or just the debauchery of the very wealthy?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7860297/Billionaire-tycoon-Ronald-Burkles-producer-son-27-dead-Beverly-Hills.html
A “producer”. Hmmm.
n
and the ‘meta’ aspect, why the tongue bath in the press for a nobody who probably died from a drug overdose? Oh yeah, look at dad.
Chickens coming home to roost? Payback? Housecleaning? Message? or just the debauchery of the very wealthy?
Debauchery. Probably something way kinkier than a simple drug overdose.
“A.F. Branco Cartoon – Some Things Never Change”
https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-some-things-never-change/
“After the death of Soleimani Iran will continue to chant “death to America” and attempt to harm the U.S., So what’s different? Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2020.”
Wow, is that ever true.
Anybody here use Libre Office Calc (the spreadsheet)? Ever since apparently 1/1/2020, calculated dates that result in zero display as 12/30/1899, no matter what cell formatting is used. Weird bug. Of course, Googling it only results in very old posts, nothing current.
Yeah, I know, the true cost of free.
Over The Hedge: Pelotons and despair
https://www.gocomics.com/overthehedge/2020/01/07
Yup. And despair is a sin.
I’ll just ramble for a bit. I know several of the regular contributors here have a dog, but I’m not a dog person. Not really a pet person, in general. This week I have a dog. My roommate’s daughter is between homes since breaking up with the boyfriend she was living with. OK, she can stay briefly with us, but she comes with a dog.
He’s an American Bulldog, so I’m told. I can tell a Chihuahua from a Great Dane, but I haven’t studied the subject too much. Just 1 year old. He was very excited last night being in a new place but he calmed down after he sniffed every single thing in house. This morning he went off to the vet and will return a somewhat lesser dog, if you get my drift. He’ll be staying with us while he wears the cone of shame.
I think the dog will adjust to me just fine. Will I be able to adjust to the dog? Like I said I’m just not a pet person, but I’m going into it with an open mind. I instituted the “Prime Directive” last night: no dogs on the furniture! Since he was allowed on the furniture at his last home that might take some training.
Over The Hedge: Pelotons and despair
Cribbed from Planet Fitness. Ever since New Years, their commercials feature a comparison with “the bike of shame”.
Anybody here use Libre Office Calc (the spreadsheet)? Ever since apparently 1/1/2020, calculated dates that result in zero display as 12/30/1899, no matter what cell formatting is used. Weird bug. Of course, Googling it only results in very old posts, nothing current.
Lotus made a mistake with allowing 1900 as a leap year in Lotus 123. Using 1/1/1900 as ‘Day 1’ of the epoch as counted in integer day values was Microsoft’s attempt to both preserve compatibility and make math geeks happy.
As with rand()/srand(), I’m guessing BillG laid down the code decades ago and no one dares change it, another piece of weirdness in the Microsoft C library which will outlive us all.
JLP, also to ramble a bit, with possibly nothing to be gained.
I AM a pet person… Grew up with animals, and have had some into adulthood. Currently without any, and life seems a bit incomplete. How long will this last? No idea. Some things just happen.
My advice is probably not good for a “brief” stay, but then… Small animals, especially dogs, can be trained. It takes devotion, patience, time, and technique. If you have never done that, you will not accomplish much in a week. If you have experience, you will still not accomplish much in a week. Maybe better to just remove or cover everything susceptible to damage. Also, confining the dog to one or as few as possible rooms might help. At one year, most dogs are still acting like puppies, which means lots of energy and possibly chewing. I don’t remember if you are a long time reader of this site, but I remember our former host’s adventures with border collies. Not to scare you: a border collie needs a job. Bulldogs are much less demanding. Good luck.
Got it. I am going back to MS Office as soon as I can. It never let me down, and that’s saying a lot. Some of my spreadsheets are too important to me to chance problems like this. LO is remarkable as an independent project, but has many operational difficulties. #1 is that it is maintained by volunteers. Firing volunteers leads to other problems.
Thanks, JimB. Good advice from someone experienced. That is what this site is about, in many ways.
As a kid we had a dog for a while, but it wasn’t my dog. We had cats (mostly outdoor cats), but they sort of took care of themselves. My first thought was stay out of the way and leave the dog to the others. They have had many dogs in their lives and it is second nature to them. Today I am thinking that I would like to see how well I interact with the dog. It might reinforce my current “no pet” thinking, or I might have a complete change of heart. I’m willing to explore new possibilities.
“Muslim religious leader in Texas charged with sex crimes against four children”
https://nypost.com/2020/01/07/muslim-religious-leader-in-texas-charged-with-sex-crimes-against-four-children/
Another illegal alien in my neighborhood.
Got it. I am going back to MS Office as soon as I can. It never let me down, and that’s saying a lot. Some of my spreadsheets are too important to me to chance problems like this. LO is remarkable as an independent project, but has many operational difficulties. #1 is that it is maintained by volunteers. Firing volunteers leads to other problems.
I just checked — Excel will give you the same result.
Oops, I should not have been so quick to criticize. Also not sure this is a real bug or something else. In fairness, I did try a few things, but am busy and figured I would get back to it; maybe it will get fixed.
Wonder which one will be first to swat it? My hat’s off to folks who maintain code. They live with complicated beasts.
JLP, yes, my favorite site for many years.
Notice I didn’t state cats or dogs… or other creatures. Here in the desert, people have some pets not available elsewhere. But cats and dogs are very different. I am one of the few people I know who likes them about equally. I do recognize the difference, though, and you pointed out one important characteristic.
A a kid who befriended just about all neighborhood dogs and cats, I understand your thoughts. However, other peoples’ pets are like grandchildren: have fun with them, spoil them, and then they go back home! Take this as an opportunity. In spite of some of the stereotypes, cats and dogs like human companionship.
Another thought. I read in our local paper about a widower who (I think) couldn’t have a pet for some reason. He went about an hour a week to the animal shelter and just hung out with the dogs and cats. He was apparently well known by the staff, who appreciated what he did almost as much as the animals.
I use it. Got a monthly statement from an investment office in mail today. Will go to my spreadsheet and enter amount and re-date to 12/31/2019. Will also enter 1/1/2020 and post back.
@JimB: I use Calc, at least for simple things. I don’t think that’s a bug. As I understand it, all spreadsheets just represent dates as integers, with 0 being some arbitrary date. Apparently 30-Dec-1899. If you put a 1 in a cell, and format it as a date, you get 31-Dec-1899, 2 becomes 1-Jan-1900, and so forth. This is intended behavior, for date-formatted cells, and I think it is the same in Excel.
When it comes to macros, however, there is definitely no compatibility.. Someone at my school has created a huge, amateurish, macro-filled monstrosity that we now have to use when grading projects. Entering data into it is a total PITA. I had to install MS office in a virtual machine, just to be able to grade my student’s projects.
Why a VM? On my work laptop, I installed Linux on a parallel partition. I left the Windows install on there, but haven’t used it in ages. When I did try to boot it, not too long ago, the disk rattled…and rattled…and rattled… probably a zillion pending updates. And ultimately would not let me log in. So no more Windows on my laptop, ever. Fine by me…
– – – – –
@JLP: That’s generous of you, giving her and her dog a place to stay. I’m not any sort of expert, but I’m pretty sure that Bulldogs are an intelligent breed. If (IF!) she has trained it, you shouldn’t have any problems.
FWIW I like dogs, but can’t be bothered to spend the time it takes – a dog needs you *every* *single* *day*. And multiple times per day, for walks, training, tricks, whatever. My wife *is* a dog person, so that works: I get to pet the critter, and do stupid tricks with it. She trains it, and walks it, and so forth.
I’ll take my cat. She goes for walks, sometimes, if she’s in the mood She does a fair number of tricks (sit, shake, turn around, lie down, etc.). But if I ignore her for a day or two, she doesn’t mind – she just takes it out on the local mouse population.
Actually that was accomplished by a team of 12 (Hill’s Dirty Dozen) back in 1972 while in the USAF. We had to extend dates thirty years and encountered Y2K before it became a “thing”. With limited storage dates were stored as simple integers. Six digits could store a much larger date than YYMMDD.
This also made date addition and subtraction very easy. A few routines to do conversions was all that was needed for human dates.
“Y2K20? A Few Systems Aren’t Handling the New Year Very Well”
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/y2k20-a-few-systems-arent-handling-the-new-year-very-well
Looks like a few systems are having problems.
Wonder which one will be first to swat it? My hat’s off to folks who maintain code. They live with complicated beasts.
Dunno what changed in LO on 1/1/2020, but 1/30/1899 is the correctly formatted value for date with an integer value of 0 using 1/1/1900 as ‘Day 1’ of the epoch.
Lots of legacy software can read and write Lotus format, and the Lotus suite for Windows 3.1 was arguably more popular than Office, remaining common in Corporate America well into the late 90s.
I personally witnessed WfW 3.11 machines in use in Corporate America into the late 2000s, some probably still hanging around in the remaining Sears stores, and even if those are all gone, Windows 10 has VB 6 API support until it sunsets.
Actually that was accomplished by a team of 12 (Hill’s Dirty Dozen) back in 1972 while in the USAF. We had to extend dates thirty years and encountered Y2K before it became a “thing”. With limited storage dates were stored as simple integers. Six digits could store a much larger date than YYMMDD.
BillG is a huge fan of Knuth and other computer historians so he (or another Microsoft developer) probably -er- “borrowed” the solution.
I remember Gates quoted in an interview in the mid-90s, saying that anyone who read all three (at the time) volumes of “Art of Computer Programming”, fully comprehending the material, should call him to talk about a job.
What MS added was the addition of the fractional part which is used to represent time. The USAF did not have to worry about time, just days. My team discovered that January 1, 2000 was going to be a problem in 1972 and were in the process of developing a new system. We came up with the solution. Solved a lot of date math problems.
To compare dates was easy. To add X days to a date was easy. To sort dates was easy. To get number of days between dates was easy. All we really needed were routines to convert to/from a human form and some routines to convert integer intervals into months or weeks. Leap years were a minor issue.
I had a water pipe break Sunday night. After supper. The pipe from the well goes into a tee. Straight up goes to the water heater. The other direction feeds cold water to the rest of the house.
The pipe snapped right at the top of the tee. Ok. Turn off water to the house. Pee outside. Brush teeth with bottled water.
Monday was a trip to the local hardware/lumber joint. All I needed was a tee and a few feet of pipe. Yeah, I have pipe but it’s under the EDC and I don’t know what sunlight does to pipe. So, fresh new pipe. Ten feet for almost $3. The tee was all of 49¢. But I bought 3 tees, 3 right angles, and 3 slip joints. Because sometimes I mess up.
Sometimes.
After several hours of crawling under and around and out from under the house, success. It’s not insulated enough yet but it is ok for the next few days.
I’m so stiff between my shoulder blades, it’s almost a crick in the neck.
I’ll live. $13 for parts (bought extras!) and a few hours time. I have no clue what a professional plumber would have charged. Not planning to find out, either.
The section looked like it may have been repaired before. But that would have been pre-1992. Maybe it was that way because that’s how it works. Shrug. So, say it was built like that in 1981. Ah, almost 40 years. If my work is “as good” and not better, it’s not my problem anymore. If I’m here when I’m pushing 100 real hard, yeah, calling a plumber. 🙂
The weird part was the dogs. Missy never went under the house to see what’s up. Penny acted offended that I vanished under the house. Previous dogs? Nose in yer butt, licking your face, picking up tools and walking away, and generally just hanging out. Good times.
What MS added was the addition of the fractional part which is used to represent time.
The fraction allowed 12/30/1899 to be ‘Day 0’ of the Epoch, permitting 60 to be formatted as 2/29/1900, a date that doesn’t really exist outside of spreadsheets.
Microsoft srand()/rand() smells like Knuth. MAX_RAND 0f 0x7fff is the stuff of crpto nerds nightmares (or dreams, depending on your ethics), but sufficient to teach the principles with his theoretical CPU.
@JLP,
if trying to train the dog, “command voice” ie. sound like you mean it, and absolute consistency. We trained my roommate’s dog to stay off furniture in only a couple of days. The trick was commanding “DOWN” or “OFF” (or whatever hasn’t already been trained) and NOT calling the dog to you or saying no (you can say no if you see him jump up, but only then and only in a sharp command voice.)
Praise him when he does right.
n
(some people use OFF to have the dog leave whatever he’s messing with alone, ie. DROP THE BALL. Some only use DOWN when countering jumping, some use it instead of LIE DOWN.)
@JimB,
I deleted the date 11/30/19 from a cell and typed 1/1/20, Enter, and it showed up in the cell as 01/01/20. In the entry line at the top, it showed as 01/01/2020. I checked the Format of the cell and saw Date 12/31/99, both highlighted. I selected the format 12/31/1999, which is the next one down and the displayed was 01/01/2020.
My home MS Office was company provided for work at home, 97-2003. I retired in 2007 and never bought one for home. I have it OK on my desktop, Windows 7, and prefer. MS Office over Libre. That 97-2003 Office CD did not install properly on this W10 laptop so I use LibreOffice 6.05.2 (x64) on it.
Right click on the cell, select Format Cells……, select Category Date, select desired Format.
Visit to Kernville this month is up in the air.
I have it OK on my desktop, Windows 7, and prefer. MS Office over Libre.
I keep an old Word 2007 around just to edit my resume and output proper Word 6.0 format. From what I understand, the input/output module related to Word 6.0 *.doc is a mess of spaghetti code that even Microsoft has given up trying to untangle.
Excel handles the date correctly in my copy.
The NYC parking glitch is not a Y2K20 issue, just incompetence: “The meters’ credit card payment software was configured to end on Jan. 1” Could have just as well been set to end as of Feb. 14, 2021.
Currently ‘dad’ to two delightful ‘bully’ rescues, both had been mistreated but some TLC has resulted in two loving dogs loving their forever home.
If you’re considering a dog, please, please visit your local shelter and rescue one from ‘jail’. You’ll both feel much better and you will save a lot over buying from a breeder or a pet store.
I strongly recommend crate training for a new dog – a couple of old bath towels and they make it ‘home’ and it allows you both to have the occasional break. Covering the crate at night will help them sleep.
For training, I like to stick to one word commands (SIT, COME, OFF, etc.) and be consistent – e.g. DOWN is always flat to the floor while OFF is off the couch.
From Reuters via Drudge link…
WORLD NEWS JANUARY 7, 2020 / 8:27 PM / UPDATED 16 MINUTES AGO
Iran starts ‘second round’ of attacks against U.S. bases in Iraq: Tasnim
1 MIN READ
CAIRO (Reuters) – Iran has started its “second round” of attacks against bases holding U.S. troops in Iraq, the Tehran-based Tasnim news agency said on Wednesday.
The second round of attacks started an hour after the first phase took place, the agency reported.
Been away for a few hours. Regarding the date, I found the issue. Excel sets 1/1/1900 as the integer value 1. Libre Office Calc sets it as 2. It says so right in the Help file, and I proved it just now. Since I was working on a spreadsheet originally created in Excel, I assumed Calc would behave like Excel when using it. It does for everything I have noticed, just not this. Apparently it converts when opening the file, and then converts back when saving it. That should work, but I have no idea why it doesn’t. Subtle issue, not necessarily a bug. Has nothing to do with 1/1/2020. I just never noticed until now. I don’t have a copy of Excel installed anywhere, so can’t try it.
The solution is to redo my formulas, which should be easy, but will look into this later. A little hard to explain, and probably a novice mistake. I used the NOW function to generate today’s date, and then subtracted an entered date from NOW to determine if that date was before or after NOW. If the result was NOW or later, I calculated a new date that was the difference. There’s more, but I am suffering from brain fade. 🙂
One other thing. Greg, you said, “Dunno what changed in LO on 1/1/2020, but 1/30/1899 is the correctly formatted value for date with an integer value of 0 using 1/1/1900 as ‘Day 1’ of the epoch.” Of course, you meant 12/31/1899, and that applies to Excel, not Calc as I explained above. You also say, “The fraction allowed 12/30/1899 to be ‘Day 0’ of the Epoch, permitting 60 to be formatted as 2/29/1900, a date that doesn’t really exist outside of spreadsheets.” If I understand this correctly, I should be able to see 2/29/1900 in Calc. Nope. I created a series of a few integers either side of 60, and Calc handles it correctly: 59=2/27/1900, 60=2/28/1900, and 61=3/1/1900. I would think Excel works in a similar fashion. What have I missed?
Fun with dates, taken to another level inside spreadsheets. I think I’ll take the rest of the date off.
You go under the house. I go under cars… same idea. My dogs used to crawl under to “join” me, sometimes sneaking up and surprising me. Yeah, good times. Miss them a lot.
And, agree with Alan. Get them from a shelter. Or, get them from a friend or neighbor who has a litter. The only papers we ever had were under the dog. 😉
More rockets fired at US assets in Iraq. Iran is now open to direct retaliation. That’s how dumb they are. I think a nice MOAB over an Iranian military installation would be appropriate. Stop the tit for tat. Israel might like to lob a few MOABs, too. I also believe tRump will be elected for a second term.
Dunno what changed in LO on 1/1/2020, but 1/30/1899 is the correctly formatted value for date with an integer value of 0 using 1/1/1900 as ‘Day 1’ of the epoch.” Of course, you meant 12/31/1899, and that applies to Excel, not Calc as I explained above.
12/30/1899 is the formatted date for a value of 0, not 1/30/1899. Sorry. Long day at work.
12/31/1899 would be ‘Day 0’, 0 + some fraction of time less than a whole day.
. I created a series of a few integers either side of 60, and Calc handles it correctly: 59=2/27/1900, 60=2/28/1900, and 61=3/1/1900. I would think Excel works in a similar fashion. What have I missed?
Interesting. Calc must try to correct the error. I only had Excel at work to play with.
More rockets fired at US assets in Iraq. Iran is now open to direct retaliation. That’s how dumb they are. I think a nice MOAB over an Iranian military installation would be appropriate. Stop the tit for tat. Israel might like to lob a few MOABs, too. I also believe tRump will be elected for a second term.
Did the missiles originate inside Iran?
I figure we have so much JSTARS surveilance peering across the border that we can “go to the tape” and watch the launcher trucks roll into position. Afterwards, we watch where the trucks go.
Regardless, they’re firing blind without any clue what they will hit inside the coordinates of the base. Accuracy is, no doubt, better than Saddam’s Scuds, but the Iraqis probably had a better idea of what the ground looked like where the missiles landed in Israel 30 years ago.
The show tonight was probably more for the domestic audience in Iran than us. Doesn’t Iran have Kurds too?
Another phollower of the pedophile prophet.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/01/illegal-alien-from-somalia-and-well-known-muslim-religious-leader-in-texas-charged-with-sex-crimes-against-4-children/
Lynn’s neighborhood? Ft Bend Cty is pretty big….
WRT iran, now would be a good time to take the centrifuges offline for a decade or three. Those are legit targets.
Hope there were no innocent westerners on the plane…
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/01/breaking-ukrainian-airlines-plane-carrying-180-passengers-crashes-after-takeoff-from-tehran-iran/
Missile up the ass is a technical difficulty….
n
Lynn’s neighborhood? Ft Bend Cty is pretty big….
Almost a thousand square miles. Lots of mosques. Lots of Christian churches. Lots of Hindu temples. Over 800,000 people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Bend_County,_Texas
Almost a thousand square miles. Lots of mosques. Lots of Christian churches. Lots of Hindu temples. Over 800,000 people.
My wife and I both believe that we are occupied by the Subcontinent, but they don’t have a “Convert, kill, or extract tribute” philosophy. We’re simply the servant class.
Dunno about Fort Bend, but the big Hindu temple in Tampa builds apartments for the single male H1B visa holders working at Capital One and Nielsen nearby.
In theory, the Capital One and Nielsen jobs were supposed to be held by Floridans, hence the tax breaks granted to both companies for their presence.