Should be cool and sunny today. It was gorgeous yesterday. AbFab weather. Hooray cold front.
I spent most of the day fixing things for ebay. I did 3 different coffee makers. They sell surprisingly well, and are fairly simple. One needed internal cleaning and ‘descaling’. One needed an O ring to stop a leak. One didn’t need anything but a good scrub. I got them listed this evening.
I also cleaned and listed a couple of other things too. Cut the grass in the back yard.
Set up a fitness tracker. I don’t care about how many steps I’ve taken, but there is supposed to be some insight available about sleep patterns. That I do have an interest in. Of course I need to wear the stupid thing in bed, which might be a deal breaker. I’ll give it a try for a while anyway.
D2 had a school open house which cut my afternoon short. Nice to see the teachers, and a couple of the kids recognized me. I miss my science volunteering. It was very gratifying to see the signs for “Bleeding Control Kit” next to the signs for the AEDs in the school. Every AED cabinet has the equivalent of an IFAK in it, district wide. They rolled that out just as covid hit. I’d been advocating for it for at least a year, maybe two and they did it.
D1 has another GS sailing camp this weekend so she’ll be leaving for that late in the afternoon. I’m hoping my wife will take her, but I might be roped into the drive. We’re doing as much normal stuff as we can. Feels a bit frantic, but the world is getting ready for something.
China is flexing on Taiwan. They’ve got Hong Kong under the boot, so they can move on to the next target on the list.
At home, polls are showing regret and a growing unhappiness with Slow Joe.
Australia is going full jackboot.
The Towelie-ban is doing exactly what you’d expect them to do.
Invaders keep pouring over our border, and dispersing into the country.
Money people are still playing games with the money.
And people are angry, emotional, and lashing out.
I think it would be typical for the actual kickoff to come out of left field and surprise everyone. Something is coming. You can feel it building.
Stack. And stack some more.
nick
Wow, I get busy for a couple of days, and – wham – y’all change the whole layout!
Actually, it looks really good. A lot more readable on my phone, anyway. I saw someone say that they missed RBT’s photo – maybe one could find a better photo, and put it into the “about” section?
So, home office is “sort of” ending for me. I had a full week of lectures and meetings, although still with weird rules. I have to say, I definitely prefer WFH. That’s me, the introvert, the homebody. Still, I hope industry has learned from this: some people genuinely do a lot better *not* coming into the office. Others (presumably the extroverts) need the human contact. There’s no reason not to accommodate both. It requires a different management style, and maybe fewer-but-better managers. But that’s a different gripe and discussion…
Looks like this is the last warm week here. It’s going to rain on Sunday, then temps will be in the teens (C), that’s 50s for the barbarians out there. We already have snow in the lower mountains. Not sure I’m ready for winter, but here it comes anyway 🙂
that’s 50s for the barbarians out there
–you mean “those who’ve landed a man on the moon” 😉
57F this morning, but saturated air. Downright cold. We may get one last hurrah of summer next week, but Fall — fell.
Now to make some coffee in my machine and start the day.
n
I call it “prudent buying” not panic buying. After all, it is PRUDENT to make sure you have food to eat.
–if it has happened before, it can happen again. Acknowledging that is called “learning”. A good question is ‘how much of the food and energy price increase is supply and demand, and how much is due to monetary inflation?’
–can you think of a better time than when lying politicians tell you not to?
–how affordable will that energy be after all the providers have gone bankrupt? Price controls lead to scarcity. They are a warning sign of runaway inflation.
n
@rick, the new template is still stripping out whitespace and empty lines. If it won’t allow people to make their text more readable, the the template will have to. (I don’t see any compelling need to remove whitespace or newlines.)
SO there needs to be more space between the [person][date][time] stamp above the comment, and the start of the comment text.
As long as we’re tweaking….
n
Stepped out at 6:10 to get the newspaper (really we still get one, meager as it is). Still dark as the days get shorter but looked up to the moon, large and yellow-orange, a reminder the smoke is still up there. Official airr alert to be in effect all weekend. 69F and pleasent but 98F coming up for latr today. No fall for us yet.
How does one square these two stories?
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/09/maricopa-county-judgement-day-az-audit-report-presented-today-1-pm-criminal-evidence-will-referred-attorney-general-live-stream/
with this one?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10023891/Arizona-election-audit-report-confirms-Bidens-win-360-votes-6M-6-month-process.html
–I guess we’ll see what the report actually says later today.
n
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/it-all-depends-one-word-trust-john-rubino-warns-worst-case-scenario-too-horrible-consider
n
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-10022253/Calculator-reveals-CO2-released-year-result-latte-consumption.html
–Yea! we can all feel shame! Let’s glory in our shameful use of “the world’s” resources. Bad wokester! Bad!
Maybe we need a carbon calculator for medical waste? Or feminine hygiene products? How about all the unworn clothes and shoes in closets? What is the global impact of LEGO?
FFS, can’t anyone just LIVE their life anymore?
n
Perhaps the tide is turning, as “illegal immigrant” is used in a headline.
Maybe we need a carbon calculator for medical waste? Or feminine hygiene products? How about all the unworn clothes and shoes in closets? What is the global impact of LEGO?
Take your choice of social media sites running in “The Cloud”, implemented on interpreted language platforms inside Docker containers on virtual machines, layers and layers of energy sucking abstraction designed to let the jammie clad with the right Hot Skillz manage the mess without leaving home.
We don’t open the shipping containers anymore, and we don’t plug in the network cables.
Lots of those cloud “services” will be sold at the Austin City Limits festival in a couple of weeks. Whats the CO2 impact of the shots of $3000/bottle Pappy Van Winkle Reserve used to land the sales?
Maybe we need a carbon calculator for medical waste? Or feminine hygiene products? How about all the unworn clothes and shoes in closets? What is the global impact of LEGO?
Oh, and sex “reassignment” surgery, especially the real basket cases who have to hop on a plane to go to Thailand because they are too far gone for even US psychiatrists and surgeons to touch without fear of lawsuit.
Let the thumbs down commence!
~
What he said.
I think we should go with magenta Comic Sans as the site font with perhaps a yellow or brown background. Several blinking and scrolling marquees would be nice too. Also, if you could add one of those page hit counters that looks like a car’s odometer that would be cool. Perhaps a MIDI of Hamster Dance playing in the background? 🙂 #MidNinetiesWebDesign
My first laser printer was an Apple LW. I got it while in grad school at Colorado School of Mines in ’89 (sent there by the Army). They had it in the school store, so a nice student discount. The thing weighed a ton, but was magic with equation software on my Mac. Made printing my thesis a piece of cake.
LOL I made our first web site with MS FrontPage around ’96. The splash page was in their neon sign font AND WAS AWESOME. Blinky just like a neon sign. You don’t get any cheesier than that!
Or what is the carbon impact of building ships in korea from US scrap steel, shipped there in containers, running them for 15 years, then sending them to india to be broken on a beach, then the scrap steel used in indian foundries to make manhole covers which are then shipped BACK to the US?
and really, are you a newborn lamb to not realize that reusable cups have a different environmental impact than disposables? Although I doubt she considered the total lifecycle costs of the mugs. The clay needs to be mined, refined, cast, baked in very energy hungry kilns, covered in glaze which often uses heavy metals (with their own mining, energy, transportation, and social costs) then transported to point of sale. Not to mention the water used to clean the mugs, especially in a restaurant environment, staff to do the washing, powders to be mined, refined, shipped… and the broken mug is unlikely to be recycled and will take millennia to break down in landfills…
Hey we better avoid china plates and mugs entirely, they take millennia to break down in landfills- and that is one of the greenies big bugaboos, length of time to break down…. isn’t it?
n
There’s certainly a misconception that because something lasts longer that it automatically has a lower environmental impact. It’s been too long for me to accurately remember, but years ago I saw an analysis of how many incandescent bulbs you could manufacture and how many hours you could use them for the same amount of energy used in the creation of a CFL. People also tend to forget about all of the energy consumed throughout the supply chain. Another one is ethanol. I takes something like 1.5 gallons of gasoline to produce a single gallon of ethanol and then to top it off a gallon of ethanol has less energy than a gallon of pure petroleum gasoline.
I progressed from AOLpress to Frontpage Express to Frontpage to Dreamweaver to just writing the HTML in a text editor. I put my first personal homepage up in probably 1996 (I was home on leave from the USAF and bored one evening at home and saw that AOL let you have a couple of megs for a homepage) and the last one I probably made for myself was around 2003 or so. I’ve done a lot for employers, clients, family, and friends over the years, but haven’t had one of my own in forever.
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2021/09/covid-and-world-balance-of-power-unholy.html
go and read, saves me a lot of effort.
then ask yourself the really important question. If this is an accurate assessment, WHAT DO I NEED TO DO TO GET THROUGH THE INEVITABLE TURMOIL?
n
I saw an analysis of how many incandescent bulbs you could manufacture and how many hours you could use them for the same amount of energy used in the creation of a CFL.
— any country or society that can melt glass and refine metal, ie pretty much all of them, can make an incandescent bulb and have reliable lighting. Very few countries can make LED lighting, and do we really want to use the (actually not so) rare earth metals for lights instead of computing?
Current LED lighting (forget CFL, it’s full of toxic shite and was an intermediate tech) uses a lot of tech. It isn’t JUST the LED, there is a driver board involved. And the LEDs might have 20K hour lives, but the cheapest possible drivers don’t. They often fail very early, usually when a capacitor fails, or a diode overheats. Ironically for a tech that is supposed to be reducing energy turned to heat, heat management is CRITICAL to longevity in an LED lamp assembly.
Also incandescent is easily understood. LEDs and driver boards need a bunch of abstraction. For most people, LEDs are just magic that happens. Heat to light, by making something glow, is understandable by anyone who has ever seen a fire. This lack of accessibility is critical for growing the next generation of tech and bringing people into an understanding of tech, so that they can expand and further the tech.
n
So what is the floating “2” on the right margin on my phone??
Oh, btw, good morning to all.
~
What he said. 🙂 (Frontpage + Dreamweaver wasn’t a bad combination, as I recall)
And much as I enjoy seeing my pretty mug, would it be possible to decrease the size of the avatars? They’re too big on my phone but I don’t know about desktop.
Dig the kid’s name.
The entertainment value of the testimony in the shareholder lawsuits will be legend- … wait for it … -ary.
https://www.the-sun.com/entertainment/3725525/elon-musk-grimes-break-up/
If the answer is not “Kill enough people to fertilize a million acres of cropland” I’m going to be disappointed.
Not really joking. The commies and the tyrants and the grifters and the busybodies and the karens and the grievance whores and the leeches (a lot of category overlap there) have demonstrated that they will never be satisfied with only “reasonable” takings of our liberties, our property, and our lives. Unless we kill enough of them that the rest run away or are terrified into silence, all we’re doing is kicking the can down the road for a few years.
WHAT DO I NEED TO DO TO GET THROUGH THE INEVITABLE TURMOIL?
If the answer is not “Kill enough people to fertilize a million acres of cropland” I’m going to be disappointed.
Not really joking. The commies and the tyrants and the grifters and the busybodies and the karens and the grievance whores and the leeches (a lot of category overlap there) have demonstrated that they will never be satisfied with only “reasonable” takings of our liberties, our property, and our lives. Unless we kill enough of them that the rest run away or are terrified into silence, all we’re doing is kicking the can down the road for a few years.
So, you are saying that the Earth is a space ship and there is only enough resources for the non-crazy people. “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin:
https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-cold-equations/
That’s Grimes, Musk’s apparently ex-girlfriend. Geez, if I had so sum up the definition of a brainless California girl, I couldn’t do better than those 7 words. Can’t he do better?
Not sure why the comment numbers are now above the gravitar. Or the number ‘2’ is over on the right (but I have an idea on that).
Working on it, boss.
With kids with all the different birthing persons, I doubt he is looking for a soul mate.
https://youtu.be/s0IoKHrLyB8
If you haven’t watched this short clip of australian cops shooting ‘non-lethals’ into a crowd, you probably should.
Near the end you can see one of the guys with his toddler on his shoulders. He WAS far from the action until they were all chased his way.
Stay away from crowds. Bury that old unpapered gun, a cleaning kit, and some ammo.
n
Rusty!
I don’t believe the fans would have accepted anyone else in the job at this point. “A Very English Scandal” is proof that Davies is writing sharper material now than when he brought back “Doctor Who”.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/russell-t-davies-to-return-as-e2-80-98doctor-who-e2-80-99-showrunner-12-years-after-departure/ar-AAOMucx
Cold equations. Sorry, but that is 1950’s style writing, but way to wordy. At a quarter the length, it would have impact. Dragging the story out like that, yawn…
Australia is a giant WTF. I thought they had a collective spine, but apparently not… Pretty sad.
Davies needed to come back.
There is some resistance to the tyranny in Oz. Not enough.
Well apparently I’m driving my daughter to camp. So I’m outta here for a couple of hours. Talk amongst yourselves.
n
My favorite was when my wife made promises and then dumped the responsibility on me, so that if I didn’t drive four kids to some activity, I was the one who disappointed them all. It’s not an issue any longer because the daughter and the other kids who’d be going along are old enough and worldly enough to see that I wasn’t the one making the promises.
Some progress on the comment area: numbers are gone, horizontal lines added, changes to comment info (name/email/etc). Comment ‘header’ doesn’t always wrap around the gravatar image – but sometimes it does. Strange.
Links still not there on individual comments. Have identified the issue (I think), and it appears to be within the theme code. Haven’t had time to try to override that part, but the theme author support is in progress (hopefully).
The ‘scroll to top’ button is gone. Author name/email pre-fill still not enabled, but that’s also a theme core code issue, I believe.
Agreed with Brad on “The Cold Equations”. It’s definitely a 1950s story and not very good by today’s standards. OTOH, they were paid by the word, not by the idea, so bulking up the prose was a thing. I’ll note also that the premise is kind of dumb and the science is very dubious.
However, Lynn, no, I wasn’t saying that there’s barely enough resources to go around. There’s plenty of world and plenty of resources, so long as people produce what they consume. (Or equivalent to be traded; I’m not talking about strict self-sufficiency.) What I’m saying is “This world ain’t big enough for the both of us.” The commies and tyrants and so on need to be run off the planet because they’re not content to see to themselves and let decent folk live in peace.
Pulled the trigger on a new iPhone 13 pro, in blue, 256 gig. Apple gave me $450.00 for my old iPhone 11 pro.
A couple of reasons for the upgrade. One is to get access to 5G which the iPhone 11 did not support. Second is traveling to Europe this spring, hopefully, I am loathe to take along my big camera again as I have done in the past. The camera on the iPhone 13 is markedly better than the 11, especially the pro version. The 13 will be more than good enough for taking pictures. Just point and shoot and the let the phone figure out the lighting.
While in the Apple store picking up my phone, I had ordered online, I noticed that the overwhelming majority of people picking up the phone were getting the blue model. Which I also got. When I went to the xfinity store to get the new phone registered the agent also had a new iPhone 13, in blue. Seems to be a very popular color.
Seems Uncle Joe is off to CAMP David for the weekend. @nick, can you give him a lift on your way home?
The cat’s away, time for The Kamel to play. You think she sneaks into the Oval Office and sits in Joe’s chair?
They learned everything from the Republican Party of the FUSA/
Incremental progress: the date of the comment is now clickable. Next step is to get it to change colors when you click on it.
What is your plan for voice and data charges when in Europe?
Any progress on the Alzheimers problem, Mr. Rick?
I assume you mean a reload back to the spot where you were? Or remembering the click on the comment date (and changing it’s color).
I think the reload/to the spot is working, although there is a short 1-2 second delay before the scrolling happens down to the spot where you last were.
The color change thing is a CSS thing that I have to find the right selector for.
Uh… If you don’t remember having been asked that five times recently, I guess we have our answer.
That, or the Name/Email being blank with every reload. As someone mentioned, it’s just a click in the box to get a list of possible values and another click to select one, so it’s not a problem, just an oddity.
Can you get the comment text to justify full left instead of to the right of the gravatar?
One of the exchange students buys a SIM card and sends it to me. When I land at Frankfurt I swap sims. I really don’t use voice but data is important for the train schedules. I use WiFi when possible.
I have done this on the last six trips. Works well.
I tell people I have a good memory, it’s just short.
Now that I’ve fixed part of the link problem (except changing color when clicked) – and a better understanding of the theme’s comment template, the next step is to figure out the name/email fields auto-fill-in.
And I have 3-4 support tickets into the theme support guys….with one of them the name/email auto-fill issue.
Hmmmmm…..heard that somewhere.
Home from my 3 hours driving in rush hour traffic. Crazy, and almost got hit a couple of times. And all for nought as they cancelled this weekend’s program. On Facebook. With no emails to participants. And without updating the activity page on the troop calendar.
I’m not happy. Kid isn’t happy. Other kid, who thought she’d have a nice alone weekend with the parents, REALLY not happy.
Oh well.
n
Another data point about blacks in the US not getting any of the vaxxes..
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/black-lives-matter-nyc-leader-promises-uprising-against-citys-racist-vaccine-passports
n
“ELON MUSK CONFIRMS “CHALLENGES” WITH TOILET ON TOURIST SPACECRAFT”
https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-challenges-toilet-tourist-spacecraft
Gonna be a very long trip to Mars with a stinky toilet. I vote we open a window.
For our BG fans, your tax dollars at work…
https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/space-force-battlestar-galactica.html
I’ve been trying out the free AdGuard on my Android for the past few days and I’m pleasantly surprised. Doesn’t seem to slow down the phone very much and by filtering the ads, many sites load faster, not to mention being easier to read. One of these days I’ll get a roundtuit and root my phone so I can edit my hosts file. One of these days…
I’ve been looking for an email client for Android and I think K9 will suit me fine. I don’t need anything fancy. Open to suggestions.
~jim, been using K-9 on my Android for at least three years. Switched to it because the built-in client could not send plain text emails.
K-9 has a zillion settings, many confusing. It just had a major facelift, and I like it better. It still can’t create folders, but can use them if created on another platform. It supports multiple email accounts well. It also can’t paste a graphic in an HTML email; converts them to attachments.
I will be switching to Outlook when I get my new phone. I have always disliked Outlook on Windows less than any other client, and I have tried many.
Good luck.