Cool and sunny, tending toward hot, with some small chance of rain – because Houston. Friday was overcast in the morning, and sunny in the late afternoon and evening, with moderate late summer temps. No rain that I saw, but lots of threatening clouds.
Drove around, did my pickups, then got home in time to see my girls off to camp for the weekend. That leaves me free to work at my secondary without regard for anyone else. Dog is fine at home in the kitchen, with access to the back yard. He’s big enough now I don’t worry about a bird swooping in and carrying him off. That was an actual concern when he was new.
So my plan (ha!) is to sleep in a bit, then pack a lunch and head out. Simple, direct, and we’ll see if it happens that way.
In the mean time, do an inventory, even if just mentally, but actually lay eyes on your stuff. See if you can find it, count it, assess its condition.
And then where you have gaps, stack some more.
nick
The legacy of “Office Space” — The first thing I thought when I saw the new “NCIS” promo poster was “Lundberg as boss”?
At GTE, we considered “Office Space” a documentary. A lot of the filming locations were here in Austin, however, legacy Southwest Bell.
https://twitter.com/NCIS_CBS/status/1437478627353022468
And, for the hardcore fans — Who is holding the door open in the background?
Talk amongst yourselves.
Ok first part of plan done. Slept in.
Now get started on the day.
I haven’t heard from my wife that they arrived safely. No goodnight or good morning yet either. The camp has good cell service so I’m starting to get a little concerned. Not actually worried, but it’s odd.
added- just got a text. they are busy.
n
n
Count those antibodies.
Concierge medicine is a whole different world. The practices profiled have probably offered Comirnaty (Pfizer) on demand since FDA approval.
https://dnyuz.com/2021/09/18/some-rich-people-are-counting-their-antibodies-like-calories/
Not to worry, Uncle Joe put the Kamel in charge of the southern border issues…
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/haitian-migrants-huddle-under-texas-bridge-creating-humanitarian-crisis-11631913491
Back safe in Vegas. We’ll spend the weekend here, then on to SA.
Anybody here have those leaf guards on their gutters? I get inundated each fall with oak leaves, pollen pods, etc that really clog the gutters. I’d consider them if the cost is reasonable. Else, I’ll just hire peeps to clean them out each year.
I filled my gutters with the foam wedges. They worked pretty well for a few years but they are silted up now. Last time I pulled them out, hit them with the hose and reinstalled. Stuff sits on top of them and they can grow moss and trees in Houston. Still, the gutters don’t “FILL” with stuff…
At the rent house I put the plastic covers on, they keep the sticks out and that helps but I still end up clearing gutters every couple of years.
n
Holy cow, one of the antennas I picked up, NIB but missing a couple of pieces, has a current listing on ebay for $2600.
I’ll be listing mine for less than that, but way more than the $3 I paid 🙂
Just a couple of the parts have sold for a bunch of money. I could part it out, but I’d rather not take the time.
n
I just finished watching the weirdest apocalypse movie ever. It is called “2149: The Aftermath” and was just released on Amazon Prime.
https://www.amazon.com/2149-Aftermath-Nick-Krause/dp/B08XQXCYX9/
After a century of wars, the survivors were placed into individual huts with a computer and food. Darwin went into his hut at age 5 and became a total hermit. He never left the hut because it was too dangerous and the air was unbreathable. Then one day lighting struck his hut and fried the computer so he left when the power ran out. To a wilderness world.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/2149_the_aftermath
My rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars (maybe)
Amazon rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars (377 reviews)
I have the screens on my gutters. Several trees surround the house. I have not cleaned gutters in 12 years on the house. The RV covering has regular gutters and those I have to clean every couple of years. In my opinion the screens work well and are worth the money.
Anybody here have those leaf guards on their gutters? I get inundated each fall with oak leaves, pollen pods, etc that really clog the gutters. I’d consider them if the cost is reasonable. Else, I’ll just hire peeps to clean them out each year.
We don’t have the brand name leaf guard that advertises on TV, but we have something on the gutters left over from the previous owners. They still require periodic checks which I’m too chicken to do on our second story roof so we still have someone out, but we don’t get leaves filling the downspout.
You want to keep trees trimmed back away from the house and thinned out to avoid problems with hurricanes and winter storms like last February. Live Oak trees fare pretty well in storms if maintained properly.
We are not at war. The drone strike in Afghanistan had to be approved by plugs. Now that we know 10 innocents were killed, some unknown general at the PinHeadaGon has to explain it. The vegetable in chief should be front and center explaining this. He approved it. He shouldn’t be eating ice cream on the beach.
The generals claim the intel is still good and the strike justified. Sorry if some goat herders were killed (along with 7 children). That’s what the intel community calls *good* intel these days? It was a total failure. I wouldn’t be surprised if nothing was double checked. It appears to be a strike just to make plugs look tough.
Our military is in serious trouble. And now McSpongeBrain gets in a pact to make nuke subs for Oz. He’s been praising the ChiComms. Now we are poking them in the eye. Why announce and make a big deal about the sub deal? Another intel failure.
<blockquote>repost from 10 Sept</blockquote>
A study of VAERS data shows the risk from the vaccine as 40.6 per million for 12-29 males. From COVID it’s 176 per million.
https://www.aappublications.org/news/2021/08/31/covid-myocarditis-risk-children-083121
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7027e2.htm?s_cid=mm7027e2_w
The link doesn’t go anywhere.
I did some reading from English-language sources in India. No mention of Ivermectin. They do mention intensive track and trace, lockdowns, and high rates of testing of contacts for driving down the case rate, including door-to-door testing sweeps. They also have about 10% of the population vaccinated.
As for the studies supporting Ivermectin. Here’s a big “oops”.
One of the major studies is coming unraveled: A hospital where one of the big trials was reported to have taken place denies that it took place. Others have refused to share data with independent researchers that want to check the paper’s conclusions, or the raw data has markers for fraud. (This from an Ivermectin supporter, btw.)
https://twitter.com/diviacaroline/status/1437892746350514180
Our house was built with little L-shaped metal pieces across the width of the doors at the edge of the roof.
Then wife wanted gutters all along from one side to the other – to keep up with neighboring improvements.
Now I see it a big mistake as gutters need cleaning again. I have never crawled out of kitchen window – even when not raining. When raining, I get in Jeep and drive out of garage.
How stupid and useless are my gutters?
Well, they can protect the foundation of your house (depending on construction) from water damage/intrusion, and the ground underneath the non-gutters by channeling the water away from your house and plantings.
If you have trees near the house, gutter guards of some sort are helpful, especially if you don’t like to (or are getting too old) to climb ladders. And if you have a two-story house.
Best to hire someone to clean out, or install gutter leaf guards of some sort.
I would so like to have gutters, just to channel the rainwater to where I want it instead of where it currently runs off the house. But everyone I ask says “oh your trees”. I would have to clean them myself if they needed cleaning. I already have to get on the roof each year to sweep off leaves and pecans in a couple of places where they “catch” and pile up. But would not want to have to go all the way around cleaning gutters. So I am listening with interest.
“SpaceX’s Starlink to Exit Beta Next Month”
https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacexs-starlink-to-exit-beta-next-month
“The end of the beta occurs as SpaceX is prepping a new Starlink dish that it can produce at a much faster rate.”
“Still, exiting beta usually signals that a service is stable and ready for a wider rollout. Starlink is currently serving 100,000 users across a dozen countries, including the US. However, the system has a backlog of over 500,000 users still waiting to try out the satellite broadband service.
One problem facing the service is that the ground-based satellite dishes necessary to connect to the Starlink network have been expensive to manufacture. The company currently produces about 5,000 Starlink dishes each week, meaning it would take two years to fulfill the current backlog of users.
Fortunately, SpaceX is preparing to boost production. The company developed a next-generation Starlink dish, which it can churn out in “multiples” of 5,000 each week.”
Good. I look forward to becoming a customer at my office. $99/month is way cheaper than the $450/month 10/10 mbps fiber service that AT&T is offering me.
“2021 Is the Year of Linux on the Desktop”
https://www.pcmag.com/opinions/2021-is-the-year-of-linux-on-the-desktop
“No, really. Walk into any school now, and you’ll see millions of Linux machines. They’re called Chromebooks. For a free project launched 30 years ago today by one man in his spare time, it’s an amazing feat.”
Not until you see Linux on the business desktops.
I use the leaf blower, faster than a broom. Just need to remember to always blow from the ridge down, otherwise you can wind up with stuff under the shingle tabs.
How stupid and useless are my gutters?
Well, they can protect the foundation of your house (depending on construction) from water damage/intrusion, and the ground underneath the non-gutters by channeling the water away from your house and plantings.
If you have trees near the house, gutter guards of some sort are helpful, especially if you don’t like to (or are getting too old) to climb ladders. And if you have a two-story house.
Best to hire someone to clean out, or install gutter leaf guards of some sort.
Yup, 60+ year olds don’t bounce.
I fell off a ladder last year changing the outside light bulbs. Three steps up, unscrewed the bulb, and a chameleon jumped in my face. I recoiled and hit the grass. The very hard grass.
Evidently Elton John fell at his house recently and broke a hip. Now I am not sure that my 2022 concert tickets are good. I wish him the best though.
https://people.com/music/elton-john-reveals-he-injured-his-hip-and-will-undergo-surgery/
My parents custom low pitch roof ranch house had screen guards on top of the gutters. Wet Maple leaves would accumulate on top of the screens and -eventually- deposit a wet silt of dead leaves in the gutters that needed laborious digging out.
“2021 Is the Year of Linux on the Desktop”
Not until you see Linux on the business desktops.
Oh, please, God, no. Corporate drone users are dangerous enough with admin access to Windows PCs. Root access to a Unix box on a corporate LAN is a recipe for disaster.
The WFH Mafia would have a lot more risky tools at their disposal to enable remote access to job environments which really should be behind a locked door on a secure network.
I know — I have a problem. I’m not a “dude”.
“Big gap between Pfizer, Moderna vaccines seen for preventing COVID hospitalizations”
https://news.yahoo.com/big-gap-between-pfizer-moderna-034719881.html
“Data collected from 18 states between March and August suggest the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine reduces the risk of being hospitalized with COVID-19 by 91% in the first four months after receiving the second dose. Beyond 120 days, however, that vaccine efficacy drops to 77%.
Meanwhile, Moderna’s vaccine was 93% effective at reducing the short-term risk of COVID-19 hospitalization and remained 92% effective after 120 days.
Overall, 54% of fully vaccinated Americans have been immunized with the Pfizer shot.”
Wow. That changes things up. Now I understand why they are pushing the Pfizer booster shot so much.
Hat tip to:
https://drudgereport.com/
“Three Weeks After Hurricane Ida, Parts of Southeast Louisiana Are Still Dark”
https://dnyuz.com/2021/09/18/three-weeks-after-hurricane-ida-parts-of-southeast-louisiana-are-still-dark/
“For many, like Ms. Brown, getting the lights back on could still be more than a week away: Entergy, the state’s largest utility, estimates that power will be fully restored in the state by Sept. 29, a full month after Ida made landfall. Linemen are scattered across the coast replacing downed wires and poles, but in some areas hit by sustained winds as high as 150 miles per hour, electrical systems will need to be completely rebuilt.”
This is why I got the whole house generator with the reserve capacity to run for weeks at a time. I figure that we will have natural gas no matter what.
“The link doesn’t go anywhere.”
Worked just now. Includes this:
“As for the studies supporting Ivermectin. Here’s a big “oops”.
One of the major studies is coming unraveled”
So how many does that leave?
There are billions of dollars at stake, and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if there are a hundred grad students “keen of eye and strong of jaw” who are selflessly (with a large amount of help from under the table money) picking away to poke holes wherever they can.
I did note that one of the pretexts for pulling the preprint on the last one was similarity of phasing with other published work. Brought back memories of the controversy over Martin Luther King Jr.’s thesis.
Fact is that it matters not how many studies. There are hundreds of millions of people without significant access to vaccines that do have access to ivermectin and other inexpensive medicines. They are in use. The experiments are being done on the world population. The success or failure will not depend on some artificial “gold standard” 95% CI double blind study with twelve bozos on the paper author list and peer review by their social network.
If there are successes, then the question will be asked: How is it that potential lifesaving treatments were poo-pooed by the multi-billion dollar medical establishment in the U.S.? As we creep up on one million lives lost in the U.S., the math becomes more and more significant. 10% efficacy might have saved 100,000 lives. At what point do the wives, husbands, sons, and daughters of the dead start gathering tar and feathers, sharpening pitchforks, and decide that it’s time to have a little “come to Cthulu” meeting with the medical establishment?
And in the meantime the president of the FUSA is conspiring to deny life saving medical treatments to his political rivals.
“2021 Is the Year of Linux on the Desktop”
Not until you see Linux on the business desktops.
I just want my camera and printer to work on my dinky little Linux laptop machine. Or any motion camera and any printer (for postage labels). If that were to happen, I would never use Windows again…..
That is what I was afraid of. Pecan leaves seem to just love to mat themselves into layers.
I always forget the leaf blower! For everything! My husband used it, and now that it’s up to me, I don’t think I have taken it off its shelf in the past 8 years. Too much in the habit of grabbing the broom, in the kitchen, on the porch, on the walk…. We don’t have carpet, so the blower would be fabulous for blowing out under the beds and bookcases! Then just vacuum the dust bunnies up!
If you only have a one-story house, there are attachments for leaf blowers and shop-vacs that will reach into the gutters. Or you could build your own with some 1″ schedule
8040 (thin wall) PVC and a couple of PVC elbows.Of the two choices, I’d go the shop-vac route. Great for dry or wet leaves. Leaf blowers might be OK if leaves are not wet, but would make a mess if they were wet. Shop-vac will grab leaves and dirt/debris.
Get a filter cover to reduce damage to shop-vac filter (or an old pair of nylons wrapped around the filter). Or a spare filter that you only use for wet stuff.
“Or you could build your own with some 1″ schedule 80 (thin wall) PVC and a couple of PVC elbows.”
Schedule 80 is thick wall (typically gray)
Schedule 40 is thin wall (typically white)
Great idea, Mr. Rick!
There’s always macOS. Sniff.
I’ll say it again: if I get a serious COVID infection, I want the tRump/Rogan protocol. Why not, what do I have to lose?
‘Science,’ They Said
Science is dying; superstition disguised as morality is returning. And we all will soon become poorer, angrier and more divided.
By Victor Davis Hanson
September 15, 2021
https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/15/science-they-said/
“If that were to happen, I would never use Windows again…..”
There’s always macOS. Sniff.
Mac OS X and Linux share the same printer subsystem, CUPS.
Apple bought out the open source project a while ago.
This is why I got the whole house generator with the reserve capacity to run for weeks at a time. I figure that we will have natural gas no matter what.
Portions of Leander lost gas in February, which Atmos has never adequately explained.
New neighborhoods too, where infrastructure was installed within the last decade.
The only information released to the media was that they had a situation where they feared a collapse of the system was imminent due to an “unusual” spike in demand.
Python is useful for solving certain problems, but I’m not sure that so much of the Internet needs to run on what is essentially an interpreted language.
Popularity isn’t necessarily a good thing.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/programming-languages-python-is-on-the-verge-of-another-big-step-forward/
Did I post this link before?
https://www.barnhardt.biz/ivermectin/
From reading on a variety of sites, this seems to be a good summary.
Your mileage will vary. Down votes are cool.
This won’t help many here, but here are some thoughts.
I have a couple neighbors with conifer trees a couple hundred yards away. The needles never make it to my property. My trees are downwind, downhill, and lower than my gutters. I inspect my gutters annually, and have only found a light coating of dust in over 40 years. Our rainy season cleans out the dust. Must be doing something right.
I grew up in the midwest with maple trees. Dirtiest things in my experience, but beautiful. Seeds in Spring, leaves in Fall, and sap most of the year that discolored sidewalks. Their leaves were so big they seemed to blow over the gutters. The seeds washed on through. We did have homemade screens on some of the gutters closest to the trees, and I don’t remember cleaning them very often, maybe every few years.
@Paul
Thanks for the link.
A site for the open-minded only.
I did enjoy the fan letter that included:
“My wife had flown ahead of us for meetings. When we met up with her, our 13 year-old son told her “We had a great drive. I now know all about the sodomites in the Vatican.” We chuckled at that.”
Did I post this link before?
No. OFD used to be the Barnhardt fan here, and I generally note when someone else links to one of Annie’s posts.
I start to think, “That’s OFD’s job …”
Gotta get some of that NFL “grass.” Those guys on Sunday seemingly bounce right off of it.
Yes, true in the Plumbing aisle. In the Electrical aisle both 40 and 80 are gray.
And never the twain shall meet.
“My wife had flown ahead of us for meetings. When we met up with her, our 13 year-old son told her “We had a great drive. I now know all about the sodomites in the Vatican.” We chuckled at that.”
My kids know that the Pope isn’t a “real” Pope, but they aren’t Barnhardt readers and I’m not a fan on the level of OFD. I have no clue where they got that. We aren’t even Catholic.
They do know about the Vatican assassins being AWOL, but I figure that is the DaVinci Code movies.
Eventually the jammies have to come off…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-gCRX23slw
My uncle Jim fell off a ladder in the ought’s, cleaning gutters, broke his arm. Went into the hospital, caught pneumonia, never came out.
Heck of a way for a fighter pilot to go.
I just planted trees this year, and have no gutters…
Big rally today in DC:
1) Trump was right, and Louie Leiu walked right into it
2) Police outnumbered attendees
3) Press outnumbered attendees
4) fedboyz dressed at Goodwill
Police arrested one metrosexual for carrying a gun. Video is hilarious. They pull his wallet and flip open a badge.
https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2021/09/18/police-detain-man-for-having-a-gun-at-j6-rally-in-dc-but-theres-a-big-twist-n444952
Lots of gutter cleaning attachments available. This one attaches to your 2 1/2″ hose on your shop vac: https://amzn.to/2XuvFAW for about $33. Not very long, but you probably already have some hose extenders you can add to it. Most shop vacs will also ‘blow’, which is OK for leaves that aren’t wet.
There are also attachments for your hose to spray clean the gutters, like this one: https://amzn.to/2XwcmrF for $30.
Or, as previously mentioned, you can build your own with some schedule 40 plastic pipe.
I have been informed by my primary care physician and the Orthopaedic surgeon that I am to stay off ladders, forever. I doubt I will listen.
Check with @nick for tips, he’s been blowing out his house for a while.
From the article, for @lynn
The top 20 languages also included Classic Visual Basic, Groovy, Ruby, Go, Swift, MATLAB, Fortran, R, Perl, and Delphi.
Fortran’s re-emergence as a top 20 language is notable. Just in July 2020, Tiobe ranked it as the 50th most popular language. But earlier this year, Fortran shot up to the 20th spot in Tiobe’s index.
Fortran, designed at IBM in the 1950s, remains popular for coding on the world’s most powerful supercomputers. However, some US Fortran standards committee members think the language is under threat from other languages eating into domains Fortran historically performed well in. The catch for Fortran is that developing new features also risks breaking old code.
When I RTFM for my RIDGID shop vacuum it says to remove the paper filter when using it in ‘wet’ mode.
The top 20 languages also included Classic Visual Basic, Groovy, Ruby, Go, Swift, MATLAB, Fortran, R, Perl, and Delphi.
I didn’t catch Delphi. Hot Skillz circa 1995!
My favorite is still Sybase’s PowerBuilder.
Every PC Magazine issue for a couple of years had the insert just inside the cover:
LEARN POWERBUILDER OR LOSE YOUR JOB!
Lots of developers did at Johnson & Johnson Critikon in Tampa. What happened? They lost their jobs when they delivered a pile of bad PowerBuilder junk!
I love blowing out the house. Do it at least 2x a week. Very satisfying. dustbunnies roll like tumbleweeds ahead of my magic wand. Do make sure that the air conditioner is running so that the filters have a chance to grab whatever gets kicked up in the air.
N
Got a lot done. Very stiff and sore. Tomorrow will likely be working at home. I should clean the house ahead of the girls’ return.
N
I fell off a ladder last year changing the outside light bulbs. Three steps up, unscrewed the bulb, and a chameleon jumped in my face. I recoiled and hit the grass. The very hard grass.
Gotta get some of that NFL “grass.” Those guys on Sunday seemingly bounce right off of it.
Yeah but they are in their 20s. Except for one notable 44 year old.
I fell off a ladder from about 12 ft up, into auditorium seats. Broke a vertebra and have had back issues ever since. Really lucky to land in the spot I did, as it was about the only place to land and not be killed or crippled instantly.
I don’t like being up on extension ladders after that.
My sibling was painting and fell off a six foot ladder. Punctured a lung, sliced liver, had to be transferred by air to a better hospital. Nearly died and it was just a short ladder.
Ladders are still one of the biggest killers in the workplace.
n
–huh, didn’t Lil’ Marco Rubio say pretty much the same thing with the immigrants “vigorous” ness….?
n
–sums it up.
n
The Albany Times Union is not in Stefanik’s district. She’s farther north and west, covering the rural counties of the upper lobe of NYS.
The T-U has been hard-left since at least the Clinton years, which is when I moved to the crapital district. Hard-left even by news media standards, that is. I haven’t paid any attention to them in decades, part of a wave which is seeing thousands of journalists lose their jobs.