Hot? Humid for sure.
Yesterday was humid enough after about an inch or more rain overnight. The rain came with some thunder and lightning too. Unfortunately I’d left a footlocker open to air out, and forgot about it. It needed a bit more time to dry after that…and the contents….
One thing I’ve learned is that most electronics can get pretty wet and still be fine, if they’re not under power when wet. Some things seem to rust in light humidity, and others are fine after sitting in a bucket for a week. Funny, but it is true. Getting soaked isn’t necessarily a death blow for electronics.
Spent the afternoon at my client’s house. Electronics DO NOT like lightning and power surges. Two more wall wart power supplies got toasted, one video extender (about 100 ft of cat 5 attached to it), and AT&T’s DSL line all smoked. The UPS did its job and shut down to protect the rack, but the DSL modem was a likely entry point to it. DSL wall wart was one of the casualties. I’ll probably have to replace that UPS at some point soon too. It could be that some of the wall warts that are dying might just be EOL. The replacement I brought, new old stock, had one dead psu right out of the box. The extenders are 7-8 years old and the chinesium psus might just be all dying of old age. Or the damnable ROHS tin whiskers might have got to them. I think I’ll crack one open and see what I can see. We have tried over the years to make it more stable. The client installed a whole house surge suppressor at the panel, I’ve got the UPSs in front of the rack, and some additional surge protection on things like the projector. I added new surge protectors to two of the outdoor TVs yesterday. They are out in the country, and there is a lot of weather out there…
Today I’ve got some errands to run, and then I’m back onsite to work with AT&T on an appointment to get the line back up. I’ve hopefully got my notes from the last time to get me through to second tier support and not get the “I am helping you very much sir” crew for an hour…
Dinner was a pork roast put in the deep freeze a year ago, with some carrots and rice. My wife did the honors while I was stuck onsite. Easter candy for dessert.
My wife has taught our kids to play backgammon, and they really don’t like losing. My little cutthroat kept her older sister on the bar for the whole game and backgammoned her. OH THE WAILING…..
This is the last week of school, and the kids were briefly looking forward to sleeping late and laying around reading and watching youtube vids of people doing stuff in Minecraft… My wife has other plans. They will continue with a modified school curriculum, at least until my wife gets tired of it. I’ll be pushing for some lazy days with nothing to do. That’s what summer break is supposed to be for.
While driving home I heard a radio ad for the local Ford dealer, with a variety of discounts and financing plans on offer. 120 days no payments and 84 months of ZERO interest? $20K off full size pickups? $9K off Expeditions, and similar discounts on most other models? $21.8k for Ranger? Holy crow, they’re gonna be cheaper than used until Hertz crushes the used market by dumping their inventory. The other manufacturers won’t be far behind, nor will the other rental companies. Don’t buy yet, but soon the deals will be hard to resist. If there is any money to buy them.
I don’t think the low car prices are a good sign for the economy, BTW, I think it’s a bit terrifying that they are offering those deals, and on 800+ vehicles, not just a few loss leaders.
We’re really just getting started. Who knows what the economy will look like in 3 months, or 6? I know I’ll feel better about it, no matter what comes, with a full pantry, and safe…
Keep stacking.
nick
While driving home I heard a radio ad for the local Ford dealer, with a variety of discounts and financing plans on offer. 120 days no payments and 84 months of ZERO interest? $20K off full size pickups? $9K off Expeditions, and similar discounts on most other models? $21.8k for Ranger? Holy crow, they’re gonna be cheaper than used until Hertz crushes the used market by dumping their inventory.
I’ve seen ads on the local news from the local Chevy dealer in town offering 90 months at 0%. 96 was where the finance companies used to consider the vehicle to be worthless so we’ll see who goes there first.
Hertz and the rental car companies took a lot of questionable product from the manufacturers in the last few years. There really isn’t any such thing as a sh*tbox (Thank you Brock Yates) anymore, but some vehicles don’t fare well in rental fleets given the wear and tear and maintenance shortfalls. I’d be wary buying anything from Hertz with a turbo charger (lots of new trucks) or CVT (Nissan).
Also, Cash for Clunkers 2.0 is coming. Anything more than 20 years old to get the late 90s cars off the road, anything which will run adequately with not much more than oil regular oil changes.
Does that mean we can finally trade in Hillary and Michelle for some much needed cash?
My parents used to rarely use the A/C and when they did use it the thermostat was set at 78℉. Consequently, our house would get quite humid in the Summer months at times. Most everything was unaffected except printer paper. The paper would get wavy as it absorbed moisture from the air and then the ink would blotch when you printed on it with an inkjet.
I don’t think we ever played a game of Monopoly as kids that didn’t end in somebody crying (and somebody trying to steal from the bank when nobody was looking). My brother and I used to play Battleship (the non-electronic version) and we both cheated horribly at that by quietly moving our ships when somebody would have scored a hit. Board games always led to tears or cheating as kids. What horrible people we were. lol
Competitiveness is good, but losing is part of life. We don’t always get what we want, sometimes not even when we really, really want it. How you deal with losing shows a lot about your character. These are challenging lessons to teach your kids.
Apropos of nothing at all, I came across one of my all-time favorite commercials. You need sound, or it won’t make sense.
Even under power, the cpu will usually crash but after a thorough drying, everything is fine.
@brad, I never saw NYNEX commercials, but just watched a few. My favorite was Die Casting!
Electronics and water… I remember when Tektronix washed their oscilloscopes as part of nornal service and calibration. I think the reason was mostly cigarette smoke.
Best scopes I ever used. Wish I had one. Been looking at some of the modern LCD scopes, but don’t really need one enough to justify the cost.
@JimB: Oscilloscopes are fun. I bought a bunch of spare electronics for cheap from the disposal yard of Kirtland AFB. Probably my best find was a non-working oscilloscope that had clearly been ripped out of something larger (it only had a front panel. It turned out to just need one vacuum tube replaced. Not much good at high-frequencies, but for a high-school kid it was just fine.
I enjoyed electronics, but I was absolutely crap at building analog things and making them work. Digital – that’s apparently how I tick. And software – give me software any day 🙂
Electronics and water… I remember when Tektronix washed their oscilloscopes as part of nornal service and calibration. I think the reason was mostly cigarette smoke.
Best scopes I ever used. Wish I had one. Been looking at some of the modern LCD scopes, but don’t really need one enough to justify the cost.
Jabil permitted smoking on the assembly line well into the 90s. Even after Sun insisted that the smoking stop on the line because it caused adherence problems on their SMT SPARC chips, labs and offices were still smoker paradises when I left in mid-1993.
I sat outside accounting, and the older women in there would go all day.
I wouldn’t know. -modest cough-
If you need a pair of plugged nickels I guess you could.
It would be better to compost the both of them, then use them to fertilize the garden of some neighbor you don’t like.
Awesome. lol
“It would be better to compost the both of them, then use them to fertilize the garden of some neighbor you don’t like. ”
–if you wanted to salt the earth…
n
Oh, sorry. Did I say fertilize? I meant contaminate.
I have an old 5″ green phosphor recurrent sweep Heathkit scope I built circa 1962, and I still use it. Good enough to keep me from getting a $new one.
I hobbied in ham radio, worked as a broadcast engineer, got an EE degree, and designed RF, analog, and digital stuff until I got into project management. Loved power circuitry and digital; hated linear audio (servo) stuff. Never did software, but was exposed. Back in the day, we didn’t *need* software. Don’t get me wrong, modern stuff is great, but I still like some of the simpler times. When a power circuit crashed, it was sometimes spectacular. 🙂
I’ve got a nice four channel Tek oscope that I didn’t pay too much for. Anything with a CRT is going pretty cheap on ebay. Hamfests are even cheaper. I sold a new in box 20mhz BK precision for ~$20. Someone online recommends spending about a dollar/ mhz of bandwidth….
If you have the scratch, a handheld color Fluke Scopemeter is an awesome tool. Even with only 2 channels and relatively low bandwidth, it’s great. I’d love to have one (or to have kept the company one). I bought the company one to diagnose a single problem onsite. We had sync issues between projectors on a multi headed display. SGI insisted that the problem was on our side and wouldn’t address the issue. I was able to show that their cards weren’t properly genlocking, and that was the end of our getting blamed for the problem. $3500 for the scopemeter was CHEAP to avoid wasting more time and money on something that wasn’t our issue. As far as I know, that was the only time that ‘meter ever got used for business. Still think it was CHEAP.
n
We need more decentralized platforms for sharing.
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/google-drive-takes-down-personal-copy-plandemic
There is a recommendation to watch the footage on Bitchute, Bitchute has issues too. Try to find a copy of the Christchurch mosque shooting there….. for example.
If you don’t hold it in your hand you don’t own it. As the journo found out.
n
From FEMA
I keep telling my daughter that, regarding backups of her pictures and drawings and documents. She mostly isn’t backing anything up except for doing a half-assed job when I hand her an external hard drive. She’s young enough that she might learn the lesson after losing something that really hurts to lose.
I’ve given up on getting my wife to learn it. She backs up her bazillion photos and videos to a free online service because it’s soooo convenient … and then loses it all when the site goes down or changes its terms of service. This has happened several times and I don’t see it changing.
Just turned the TeeVee on to maybe see the astronauts. Still have the space fever after all these years, although rarely watch live.
While waiting, there were some comments about Internet censorship, and Twitter and Facebook in particular. Since I have never done either, and have only looked a few times, I don’t see why people who dislike any site’s policies don’t simply get their own web site, where they can express anything they want. As for getting looks or likes, those folks, especially the high profile ones, could afford site managers who would promote them. What am I missing?
After all, I found this place. Not only no complaints, but it is the single best site I know of, for me. I test this conclusion occasionally just to be sure, and am seldom surprised. Please keep it well hidden, and frequented by good people. Y’hear?!
Yup, the constant narcissism of ‘like me’ and ‘followers’ is corrosive to society and the person’s own soul.
n
Thanks for the scope tips, Nick. I didn’t realize older CRT scopes were that cheap. I actually looked about ten years ago, and they were pricier than I would consider. I don’t buy and sell much, and as you can see, tend to keep things a long time. Also take good care of them. Makes me prefer new test equipment.
I used to watch ElectroBOOM quite a bit, and saw what he was using. Those little portable scopes are fascinating. As usual, I did some shopping, and tried to define what I might need. You guessed it, pretty soon I got above $1k, an amount I would not spend lightly. My needs are diverse but modest. Having two channels with 20 MHz or so bandwidth would be fine. I would also like the ability to capture long term (hours to days) events and play them back. See, drives the price up. I also don’t want to get a new hobby. 🙂
I am also fascinated with some of the higher end (but still under $1k) automotive scopes and diagnostic tools. I don’t need them for my current fleet, but will eventually buy something that will need more. I should wait until that happens, so I can have a chance to get the right thing.
Backups?!! Oooooh. I can almost hear our former host stirring. Do you suppose there are backups in the great beyond?
There is a recommendation to watch the footage on Bitchute, Bitchute has issues too. Try to find a copy of the Christchurch mosque shooting there….. for example.
If you don’t hold it in your hand you don’t own it. As the journo found out.
It is too easy for Google to sweep their filesystems and look for the audio fingerprint of the movie. Video fingerprints are harder — it was Masters thesis stuff when I was in my first attempt at grad school. I had an idea as to how to approach the problem, but the faculty wanted something related to “green” computing which was all the rage at that time.
With Linus Torvalds going to an $1800 64 core Threadripper for his daily driver PC CPU, I guess “green” computing isn’t such a big deal anymore.
Sooner or later, a black swan event will end “The Cloud” as we know it. I’m betting on everyone’s Gmail message texts going online with easy searching with Lucene at a site on the Dark Web, but anything is possible.
In grad school, I had all of Enron’s emails in a giant file provided to forensics researchers. My semester project in Data Mining was building a searchable index for the messages, something that took about a week, most of the time trying to find a logical way to split the giant text file.
I would like someone to take the wikileaks pager messages from NYC on 911 and thread them, while stripping out most of the automated M2M messages. There are some very poignant messages in there, as well as stuff about various companies and agencies responses.
Even the M2M messages can be compelling as server heartbeats go offline, and the infrastructure fails.
I’m pretty sure my messages home are in there somewhere, but I haven’t found them yet. I find reading thru them to be like rubbing my eyes with a cheese grater, soaked in Tabasco sauce. It’s like watching an explosion in extreme slow motion.
n
The curious side of me wants to know how you can make that comparison. The bizarre side of me is intrigued.
I saw a great tshirt: “there is no ‘cloud’. There is only someone else’s computer”
Here’s a very good one on the ‘minders’
https://wilderwealthywise.com/covid-nightmares-the-karen-the-mrs-grundy-and-the-awfl/
And why don’t you at least have a network drive? They’re cheap and good enough. No they aren’t off site. Belt suspenders and belt again.
I have that printed out and hanging up at work.
If you’re asking me, we did. No longer do because the old router died and the new one doesn’t support the network drive. (More precisely, it claims to, but seems not to work with Linux or Windows.) However, even when we had a nice, friendly 2TB drive on the network and the Windows machines could connect to it, no one used it. Oh, and now that I’m remembering, the iPad and iPhone couldn’t connect to it at all. (I should check whether the iCrapoleos can connect to a drive on the new router. Some other defaults were for Apple products.)
Take that out over 2 weeks and you have what I did at work while it happened. I was in a Network Operations Center and we watched pieces of our clients’ networks slowly drop off over 2 weeks. It was a really odd feeling when the last of the battery backups dropped and the final network link through the World Trade Center went offline, knowing it had been sitting under the collapsed towers for two weeks.
I don’t believe it. Why can’t they do like NASCAR? Where when a race is cancelled due to rain, they come back the next day.
Space toilets: I wonder to what extent NASA makes these easier to use through diet changes. Low-fiber diets lead to, um, firmer results, leading to simpler cleanup. Actually, it makes you wonder about high-fiber diets: animals don’t normally need TP. Humans seem to have messy poo only because we eat too many vegetables.
Having seen the south end of many cows, they need TP. It is pretty messy back there.
@gavin, wow, that must have been surreal. I was at the Meadowlands across the river doing corporate training on the day. We could see smoke from the parking lot.
The eerieness of sitting in my hotel room with all the TV stations off the air, except PBS who had a backup transmitter offsite, sticks with me to this day.
My friend’s fiance’ was on the last train thru the station, he got off, dropped a letter in the post box, and got back on a train just before the impact.
Reading thru the messages, there are a lot concerning the guys that were in the exchange under the towers. There are messages from and to the Secret Service, NYPD, various big corps, etc. There are a lot of messages activating contingency and disaster plans – “activating plan charlie”… and letting people know about call ins for various conference calls. A lot of traffic from FedEx, who originally thought they lost one of their planes.
I re-read it from time to time. I rarely get to the second impact.
n
@ray, I’ve had a number of eye injuries over the years… including stuff slicing my corneas, chemical burns, arc flash, laser burns, etc. I’ve got a pretty good idea what either of those things would feel like separately, and I can imagine them together…
and I cringe thinking about it.
n
Didn’t head out to my client today, he got AT&T to schedule a service call tomorrow. So I’ll delay my trip out until after AT&T has a chance to get a signal into my closet.
n
“HBO Max: How to Watch, What to Stream, More”
https://www.pcmag.com/news/hbo-max-how-to-watch-what-to-stream-more
“If you currently subscribe to HBO Now—either directly or via Apple, Google Play, Samsung, Optimum and Verizon Fios Internet—your HBO Now app will just update to HBO Max on supported devices (which does not currently include Roku or Amazon Fire TV).”
No Roku ? Fail.
What a bunch of tools.
Launch scrub today due to weather in Florida.
Ironically, the state is in drought conditions once again this Spring, complete with watering restrictions.
I have it on pretty good authority there is UFO activity in our solar system today and so the CIA used its weather-generating satellites to force the launch to cancel.
Clearly Trump’s fault.
n
Clearly Trump’s fault.
He’s there in FL today IIRC.
Saturday will see a huge crowd show up to watch that will upset Fauci and The Scarf Queen.
Um, ya think?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8361607/Jeffrey-Epsteins-surveillance-cameras-blackmail-scheme-extort-powerful-friends.html
n
Wow, here comes the storm….
n
One feature on HBO Max is a reboot of all of the Looney Toons classics. Preview here: https://youtu.be/CuJ1xMVqY0I .
Igloo coolers is just down the freeway in Katy. So what am I to make of this nonsensical email? I used the online contact form to inquire about getting a replacement latch for one of their water coolers. This isn’t even english….
I asked
It’s worse than outsourced indian support. It doesn’t even come CLOSE to answering my question or even acknowledging that I HAD a question.
Jeez.
n
Probably censored.
I have four LaserDisc box sets, five discs each, of Loony Toons. Some are “yikes” but still funny. The past is a different country….
Years ago I needed new hinges and latches for an Igloo and a Coleman ice chest. The whatever size, big enough for one to sit on, for two to sit on if she’s pretty, can hold maybe four case of beer and a couple bags of ice.
One company sent the needed parts for free. The other charged all of $5 for a set of hinges and a new latch. I forget what company did what.
Hey, this was back in the day when I still got catalogs in the mail from Daymark (sp?) and C.O.M.B.
Igloo coolers is just down the freeway in Katy. So what am I to make of this nonsensical email? I used the online contact form to inquire about getting a replacement latch for one of their water coolers. This isn’t even english….
Phillipines if I had to guess.
Catalogs: remember DAK?
Actually, back, but a shadow of its former self at dak.com
Ol’ Drew sure could sell!
I don’t believe it. Why can’t they do like NASCAR? Where when a race is cancelled due to rain, they come back the next day.
Doesn’t it take a couple of days to defuel and then refuel the LNG and LOX ?
@paul – the Looney Toons reboot is new production.
Original (classic) Looney Toons available on the Boomerang channel on my DirecTv .
I don’t believe it. Why can’t they do like NASCAR? Where when a race is cancelled due to rain, they come back the next day.
Doesn’t it take a couple of days to defuel and then refuel the LNG and LOX ?
The fueling/defueling time is brief. An hour IIRC.
The problem that forces the launch delay until Saturday is that the space station has to be in the right position for the crew to launch from Florida and catch up to the destination in a reasonable time while not wreaking havoc with sleep schedules for either the astronauts onboard the Dragon or on the ISS.
I listened to the spiel today after the scrub. I had the launch video going without sound while we talked to yet another 30-ish candidate management wants to hire to outrank me and make more money than I do. Plus I gotta get a cover sheet on my TPS reports this week so of course I was watching the NASA feed.
Again, no one is in the office in Fort Myers this week aside from the temp answering phones while the regular receptionist is out on Captiva. The desk clearing starts on Monday, running for about a month until everyone heads back to the barrier islands in time for July 4th crab races at Tween Waters.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/absolute-insanity-retail-investors-flood-bankrupt-hertz-make-it-most-heavily-traded-us
“The CDC’s New ‘Best Estimate’ Implies a COVID-19 Infection Fatality Rate Below 0.3%”
https://reason.com/2020/05/24/the-cdcs-new-best-estimate-implies-a-covid-19-infection-fatality-rate-below-0-3/
“That rate is much lower than the numbers used in the horrifying projections that shaped the government response to the epidemic.”
“According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the current “best estimate” for the fatality rate among Americans with COVID-19 symptoms is 0.4 percent. The CDC also estimates that 35 percent of people infected by the COVID-19 virus never develop symptoms. Those numbers imply that the virus kills less than 0.3 percent of people infected by it—far lower than the infection fatality rates (IFRs) assumed by the alarming projections that drove the initial government response to the epidemic, including broad business closure and stay-at-home orders.”
BTW, Rush was talking this morning about what a perfect infector that the SARS-COV-2 is. To him, it is almost as if the virus was engineered for humans.
BTW, Rush was talking this morning about what a perfect infector that the SARS-COV-2 is. To him, it is almost as if the virus was engineered for humans.
Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by a bat-eating crazy old Chinese woman dispensing questionable medical advice.
My wife’s cousins all have to listen to whatever nonsense comes out of “Big Aiyee’s” mouth because the Number One Uncle would cut their checks from the family rackets the moment one of them questioned the old woman.
We don’t get checks — nor would I want one — but Number One Uncle still tries to enforce the groupthink with us. That’s his gig. I used to be polite, but the family has learned I’m not anymore. I didn’t let Number One Cousin in the house the last time he came to Austin.
July 11. Disney had no choice once Universal announced, but I’m a bit surprised that they’re opening the park with the Star Wars fetish attractions.
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/coronavirus/jobs-economy/os-bz-coronavirus-disney-seaworld-reopening-plans-20200527-m2wfkypbbbfzvmrykwlafu4voy-story.html#rt=chartbeat-flt
BTW, Rush was talking this morning about what a perfect infector that the SARS-COV-2 is. To him, it is almost as if the virus was engineered for humans.
Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by a bat-eating crazy old Chinese woman dispensing questionable medical advice.
Hey, Rush is not a KOOK (keeper of odd knowledge) but, he knows many, many, many of them.
BTW, your wife’s relatives are … different. Family reunions must be alternatively a blast and pulling a gun out.
Hey, Rush is not a KOOK (keeper of odd knowledge) but, he knows many, many, many of them.
Let’s say we discover the virus was engineered by the Chinese. What then?
We’ve been pretty much at their mercy since Loral (big Clinton donor) taught them how to make their ICBMs work.
As an engineer, propulsion group, in the Delta II launch vehicle program, it’s like draining your washing machine and buying gas for you car.
Greg, that’s why the US needs to build a multi-gigawatt solar power satellite, to remove any number of external threats. Freeing our energy supply from almost single point of failure petroleum processing and distribution systems is a big feature (not to worry, Lynn, I fully support using hydrocarbons for the chemical industry, it’s just the combustion of them that drives me up a wall) but the main reason is to have a gigawatt orbital death ray to turn on our enemies. With all of the spy satellites the DIA controls it probably knows where all of the PLA’s ICBMs are hidden (they’d damned well better!) and a couple seconds’ full-power blast should damage the hatches or at least kick up enough clutter to make launch a problem for a few minutes … while our ICBMs are crossing to do the job permanently.
Greg, a thought concerning the in-laws: You’ve mentioned that some of their activities might not be completely on the up-and-up. Would it be possible for legal authorities to be informed of some activities with enough detail to get a judge to sign a warrant? And then for an informant to let them know where certain named individuals would be at a given time? Like maybe a big family party where Mr Big is lording it up … before he’s hauled away?
Seems like the same thing to me…
Greg, a thought concerning the in-laws: You’ve mentioned that some of their activities might not be completely on the up-and-up. Would it be possible for legal authorities to be informed of some activities with enough detail to get a judge to sign a warrant? And then for an informant to let them know where certain named individuals would be at a given time? Like maybe a big family party where Mr Big is lording it up … before he’s hauled away?
The rackets are mostly penny ante “victimless” crimes.
A few years ago, one of the rackets, the most notorious hip hop after-hours bottle club in the Seattle area, made the local TV news, and you could tell that the Mayor of the city near Seattle was looking the other way to keep the tax revenue flowing from the liquor sales.
If the lead on KING 5 news didn’t get them a judge’s attention, what would?
After Costco rewrote the liquor rules post-deregulation in WA State … cough … the taxes on a bottle of booze came close to 30%, often more, when Federal, state, city, and neighborhood (WA State) taxes were combined. Everbody got a “piece of the action”. 🙂
I used to have the video linked. I think I even posted it here once, but the station pulled the story offline a few years ago.
Just so everyone is clear, the police are trained that if you are TALKING, like for example saying “I can’t breathe” then you can in fact breathe. Which is a physiological truth, but not actually true in the sense that people often say “I can’t breathe” when they mean ” I’m having difficulty breathing.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/its-real-ugly-protesters-clash-minneapolis-police-following-george-floyds-death
Nothing says “Justice for my dead homie” like robbing Target and burning businesses. Not much social distancing in those crowds….
n
George would have wanted me to have this TV. I’m doing it for you, George!
Just so everyone is clear, the police are trained that if you are TALKING, like for example saying “I can’t breathe” then you can in fact breathe. Which is a physiological truth, but not actually true in the sense that people often say “I can’t breathe” when they mean ” I’m having difficulty breathing.”
Most of the public tunes out any explanation requiring more than a sentence. Your best bet to reach the masses is a few grunted words. “Hands up, don’t shoot”.
That number looks familiar:
https://www.ttgnet.com/journal/2020/03/27/fri-mar-27-2020-still-plugging-away/#comment-179294
🙂