Cool and sunny, cold fronts are lovely. Spectacular weather on Friday. Hopefully more of the same today.
Got a bunch of stuff done yesterday. Posted some listings on ebay. Sorted some stuff. Picked up some stuff.
I’d been thinking about the difference between prepping and using your preps. I’ve also been thinking it was time to shift back into a “prepping” mindset. Aesop asked the question, “What have you done this week?” and I realized I’d stopped doing the quintessential prepping posts.
Opsec has become more of a concern than ever, so you might not want to say, or you might think it unwise to say. Mention that if you will.
If you share or not, keep stacking.
n
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a37727004/feds-dpa-chip-shortage-auto-manufacturing/
The dip is looking for the chips…
Another data point about blacks in the US not getting any of the vaxxes..
According to data provided by New York state, about 85 percent of black residents have not received one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Data provided by New York City shows that 64 percent of black people between the ages of 18 and 44 are not fully vaccinated while 56 percent have received one shot.
And … ?
The Walgreens ads with the riff on “Hamilton” have finally stopped.
Maybe that wasn’t seen as pandering by the jammie-clad laptop warrior execs in Deerfield, but it played differently elsewhere.
“It’s what you want. It’s what every white boy off the lake wants.” — Jackie, “Risky Business”
One white boy running at the mouth may be brave with talk about holding down another white person and forcibly jabbing, but the speculative game changes with a modification in skin color on the jabee.
Blow darts. Yellow stars. Does this white boy still have a job this morning?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oWWcqGk1m4
I’ll bet OSHA never issues the forced vaccination mandates.
IIRC RBT used to wash the mug he used for drinking his Coke once a month whether it needed it or not.
My wife is very fastidious in not washing anything by hand. Everything goes into the dishwasher with no pre-rinsing except for the high end non-stick pan. Run when full using the Kirkland Detergent pods on energy saver cycle without heated drying (run at bedtime and most everything is air dryed by the morning.)
Did grab a couple extra tubs of the pods lsst trip to Costco to add to the stacks as they were $5 off.
Blow darts. Yellow stars. Does this white boy still have a job this morning?
Srsly?!! That video HAS to be a spoof… doesn’t it?
I stopped watching about halfway through. It was repetitious, choppy, and boring. Maybe I’m not awake (woke?) enough yet. Coffee beckons.
Starting to get ready for Christmas (taking Nick’s advice about presents to heart!). I made three batches of soap this week, and will see how it turned out once it cures. Hopefully, it will make for little Christmas gifts or stocking stuffers. Fingers crossed.
More and more, I’ve come to realize that home maintenance is a big part of prepping. Keeping things in good order with the house prevents problems down the road, and helps keep the stress level lower during hard times. Plus, costs of materials and labor never get any cheaper.
So: this week we had our trees trimmed. We’ve 3 mature pecan trees, one mature Bur oak tree, 3 smaller pecans and two 30′ crepe myrtles. I take care of the annual/low branch trimming but for a couple of years now the big high branches have needed attention. So, it was a big job, and costly, but now it is done and we should be ok for the next 6 or 8 years. I shaved a little off the cost by not paying them to haul off the branches… I’ll use my dad’s chipper to take care of those, or just do a burn. And, we got at least half a cord of firewood for next year out of it.
re: dishwasher pods
Go to youtube and search for “Technology Connections dishwasher” and watch both videos, one from 9 months ago and one from last week.
He makes a strong case for 1) not handwashing and 2) using powdered detergent instead of pods.
Attending a virtual conference this weekend, 4 am – noon my time. Painful timing, very interesting speakers. All the sessions will be available for a month after. The organizers did a good job.
2021 Science of Animal Behavior Conference
I’ll pick up 15.5 CEUs towards the 36/3 years I need to maintain my CCPDT CPDT-KA dog geek training certification.
Srsly?!! That video HAS to be a spoof… doesn’t it?
O’Keefe/Veritas? Unlikely.
I want to take a moment to THANK RickH for his continuing work here. Jerry said something like software never wears out, but changes are worse. It must not be fun to make changes to a live system.
The site looks better on my phone, and only a little worse on my computer. No specific complaints. I can easily adapt. The Previous Day and Next Day functions are missed, but I think you said they are coming back. Hoo-ray.
Folks here will probably remember I am a keyboard fanatic and seldom touch the mouse in writing mode. I am happy to report that everything I have tried seems to work as well as before. Scrolling and jumping are instantaneous, so I don’t care where I land after a refresh (F5).
On my phone, I have always missed the Home, End, and Delete (forward) keys. A touchscreen has its limitations, and I am forever touching something I didn’t intend to. Here, that is often while scrolling past the comment box, where I usually insert some odd paragraph format. I have discovered the format eraser, which is a delight.
I rarely use the various links, which are at the right side on my computer and at the bottom on my phone. I just navigate by scrolling.
Keep up the good work, and never forget that content is more important than style!
Just spent an hour and a half replacing the support rollers for our clothes dryer. And the belt and tensioner while I was at it, but it was two of the roller wheels that were worn out and howling. About $30 for parts, half an hour finding out how to do it, and an hour and a half doing it, versus several hundred dollars to have someone do it. Plus, as with the car repairs which I do but dislike doing, this way I know all of the worn parts were actually replaced with new and all of the screws are back in place.
Hip, Hip, Hurrah for Mr. Rick!
Well it is in fact a gorgeous day. 68F and sunny with a mild breeze and an absolutely clear blue sky. Not one thing to mar the blue from horizon to horizon.
So I’m still inside. I will be going outside though. real soon.
Lot of sitting and driving yesterday so I have some back stiffness today. Once I get that worked out, I’m going to move some stuff around in the driveway and patio. It is a gorgeous day after all.
Some of that will involve cleaning up after the rat in the food area on the patio. I hope the little b@stard ate the poison. Something smells bad anyway.
Maybe some attic work too, since it’s cooler up there.
n
The Child’s school did “school from home” Wednesday-Friday last week because of a few Chinese Crud cases. (One confirmed and a few suspected, I believe.) After some research by the school’s “office and paperwork” person, it appears they picked it up in sharing a bus with some public school students. (The way it works in most of the districts here is that the private school kids can get bused to the school, usually by riding the buses with the other kids to a central dispatch point, and then split off to short buses for each of the private schools.) My daughter and the friend who is (still) staying with us seem healthy but almost everyone else in their grade is sick or suspected to be sick. (Or is faking it to get out of school, these being teens, after all.)
Plus, as with the car repairs which I do but dislike doing, this way I know all of the worn parts were actually replaced with new and all of the screws are back in place.
Yes! I have friends who do some of their own work, but farm out the hard stuff. I always ask them if they trust someone else to do the hard stuff, human nature being what it is. Maybe one agreed AND changed his ways.
When we got married, my wife had a new 1971 Toyota Corona 4 door sedan. It had lots of rattles and other funny stuff. She had taken it to be “rustproofed,” and the guys there only put back the minimum number of fasteners that they could get away with. They also sprayed that greasy tar stuff inside the doors, clogging up the drains, and making a general mess. I went to the place, and complained, and a guy showed me a big can full of fasteners. He offered to give me as many as I wanted. I did take some, because that car had a jillion special clips and fasteners, and the dealer just laughed when I tried to buy a few. Before that, the only foreign car I had experience with was VW. The dealer had everything, and it was affordable. Toyotas were sold by American car dealerships back then, and it showed at the parts department. Old problems are remembered.
I don’t look forward to not being able to do my own work.
Ohh, I LIKE the new font on my phone!
It might just be a personal wish but if you can get the comments to justify full left it would eliminate a lot of white space making the site more compact and the reading even easier.
@JimB
I’ll give K9 a whirl. I used to use The Bat on my desktop. Don’t suppose you remember that? 🙂
EDIT: OMG, it’s still around! Used to be this teeny tiny text only email client. LOL. Goes to show that good programming is appreciated. I felt the same way about UltraEdit until Ian got infected with the featureitis bug around about version 6, IIRC
https://www.ritlabs.com/en/products/thebat/
Why yes, I believe it is…
The Most Important Device in the Universe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phPp5oYnps0
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2020-01-03/modern-props-closes-its-doors
Look at the bottom of the page: Next/Previous post link. And it turns red if you have already visited that page.
Oooh! Shiny!
If you click on a comment link in the sidebar, it will change to red indicating ‘visited’. But not if you click the date/time of the comment. Still working on that. (CSS selectors – irritating to figure out, even with Developer tools)
As for comment width on phones (showing text below the avatar, or wrapping text around the avatar): on the list. (Wrapping text around the avatar on larger screens also on the list.)
The Most Important Device in the Universe
Yeah. I just saw that device on a rerun of “Star Trek: TNG” within the last few days.
And “Buck Rogers” last Saturday night.
Universal also has a “computer” that popped up in a lot of their productions in the 70s and 80s.
Yay, it’s double avatar day!
Twice the Billy Jack!
Now they’re gone!
As is my avatar!
Now it’s back!
The most important “greeble” in Hollywood scifi is known as “freezer panel”.
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it everywhere. (can’t find a good link, but the easiest place to see it is in a Jeffries Tube on ST:TNG. The clanking is entirely folley as the panels are plastic.
n
@MrAtoz: that happens when a certain web guy is playing around with things. Now you see them, now you don’t!
(I was working on the Alzheimer’s issue….still not resolved.)
I used to use The Bat on my desktop. Don’t suppose you remember that?
I remember the name, but didn’t use it. I mostly changed when I changed computers or operating systems or offices. I go back to email on DEC networks using terminals. Fun times. Later, we got PCs and used terminal emulators. The first all PC email was a mess. By then, our place had mostly adopted Macs, and they didn’t work very well with the DEC network. Those that could used DEC Rainbows or Zenith 286s. Remember them? Not me. I had an old Sperry 8086 (?) with a green CGA (?) screen that I used almost exclusively for email. Klunky! Dependable as an anvil, though. Went back and forth with various Mac computers and whatever mail client was on them. Didn’t work very well, but it was what we had.
I also remember using Eudora on a 386, and it was pretty good. Finally, after a lot of incompatible systems, our site adopted Outlook with Exchange servers. It was pretty simple back then, and worked. I especially liked the groupware stuff like appointment scheduling, which worked well. It also worked with other sites that still used Lotus Notes. Finally, stability.
Funny thing. My wife really liked Outlook, but we both were on Exchange servers. When we got computers at home, I set up Outlook, without Exchange of course. She kept trying to look up email addresses and schedule appointments. I tried to explain, but she never adjusted. Later used Thunderbird on Linux, and she hated it. I never thought it was bad, just a little unpolished. Very capable, but required a lot of tweaking with third party stuff to make it do what I wanted. Now we are back on Outlook for Windows. She is happy with it, so life is good. That’s why I will try it on our new phones, when we get them in a couple of weeks. She used to have Outlook for Android, but no longer has the relationship that got that. She does not like K-9. I still don’t understand why.
We still use Gmail, and it has a mind of its own. Doesn’t bother me, but my wife likes to delete stuff, and sometimes whole conversations get trashed. I try to tell her to just not delete. I do know about the conversation mode, but don’t use it. She seems to turn it ON, which causes her trouble. Sigh.
Email should be simple. It is for me, but so many blue-haired friends I know do crazy things. I used to try to help them, but gave up. Double sigh.
Sam’s and HEB runs today.
Sam’s: Chicken thighs and drumsticks still 98 cents/lb, but wings were $2.79/lb. Sirloins we use for stir fry still $10/lb.
HEB: Chicken breasts and pork carnitas leaked all over our kitchen floor when we got home and started unloading the bags. Granted, the meat department probably had newbies wrapping the packages, but the bagger didn’t say anything either.
The HEB had a job fair for all departments this morning. They’re in a tough spot since the apartments immediately behind the store which were probably cheap when built 20 years ago are renting for $1500-2000 according to my wife.
Welcome to Cupertino East!
Dell is 10 minutes away even in rush hour. HPE is 20, but that’s because the roads get twisty and back up around the start of the Mopac toll lanes. Apple’s new campus is 15 in a different direction.
Dam it. Typed a whole comment and hit Submit before noticing my name and address were not filled in.
Anyway. I’ve bought three cars with a bank loan. The ’75 Cordoba. I paid that one year note off in six months. Then the ’85 Chevy Cavalier. Three year note, paid that off several months early.
Now the Frontier. It’s a puzzle. I’m to get the license plates in “a week or so” plus a couple more weeks for a payment book. So far, nothing. It’s been a month. Oh wait, that’s not exactly true. I have had at least 7 “get your warranty” postcards and letters and many unknown numbers calling.
So, WTF? I’m pretty sure my first payment is due Oct 6th. Do I trot my happy self to the local Wells Fargo to deal with the morons there? Or do I hide the truck out back in the woods so they can’t come to repossess it for non-payment?
And I call them morons because I bought something off of eBay for the neighbor. All of $20 and she wrote me a check. Wells Fargo wanted a d/l and both thumb prints. She banks there…. I cashed it at work.
Navy Surgeon sounds the alarm
Take a look before YT cancels it.
Paul, don’t get off on the wrong foot with the bank. I would call them before I went in person. Just me. Saves leg work.
Take a look before YT cancels it.
Doesn’t matter. It is now annecdote vs. annecdote in the arena of ideas until the numbers return to June levels and stay there. Don’t argue numbers, and for God’s sake don’t bring up VAERS.
Speaking annecdotally, it was a Navy DO who probably saved Trump’s life.
The wife half of the doctor couple down the street stopped to talk to me the other day, and she told me that the husband had to dress down his staff after he learned that they were not allowing unvaccinated patients to make appointments.
Austin. The agenda comes first.
“Never Enough”
https://areaocho.com/never-enough/
“Now the fight for a $26 minimum wage is on. Why stop there? If 26 is good, wouldn’t $100 an hour be better? Why not $500 an hour?”
https://cepr.net/the-26-an-hour-minimum-wage/
The grocery stores and other such may want to look at doing what Silicon Valley did (does?) and run shuttles from where their employees actually live, to save them the costs and stress of commuting in their own cars.
@Paul, what browser are you using?
I did the same thing yesterday and when I hit the back arrow my comment was still there in the text box. This was using Chrome. Did notice that the Name and Email labels were missing from their respective text boxes. Certainly not anything at all urgent for @RickH to worry about (if at all).
The grocery stores and other such may want to look at doing what Silicon Valley did (does?) and run shuttles from where their employees actually live, to save them the costs and stress of commuting in their own cars.
Given the property tax situation, Austin will be a lot worse than Silicon Valley, and the grocery store workers in California are unionized.
Actually, if you look at the generated page code, the ‘values’ for the ‘input’ tag fort he name/email are there. But there’s something (maybe Javascript?) that is overwriting those values so the “Name *” text can be displayed.
Puzzling.
Losing the message area text on a ‘back’ could be browser-specific, as mentioned. I always Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C before I hit the Submit button
A quick update on the GIMP issues with OS X Big Sur:
I gave up on the ‘native’ 2.10.XX versions in which you can’t see the selection, it is simply unusable.
Retrogressing to the last 2.8 version makes that work, but then it has a ‘permissions’ issue, being unable to read/write/see the Desktop/Documents/Downloads/etc. folders. Even using Preferences to set it to ‘System Wide’ didn’t work.
It can, however, see the Pictures folder, so I just moved my graphics work into a subfolder there.
I’m not a graphics guy, my stuff is usually just mockups so that I don’t have to wait on others, so it’s not a big deal.
Over The Hedge: Where Did The Moon Come From ?
https://www.gocomics.com/overthehedge/2021/09/25
Slander !
Retrogressing to the last 2.8 version makes that work, but then it has a ‘permissions’ issue, being unable to read/write/see the Desktop/Documents/Downloads/etc. folders. Even using Preferences to set it to ‘System Wide’ didn’t work.
It can, however, see the Pictures folder, so I just moved my graphics work into a subfolder there.
Apple is trying really hard to create a walled garden in OS X similar to what they have in iOS.
My MacBook Pro is stopped at Catalina. Maybe that isn’t a terrible thing.
I haven’t let the upgrade to Big Sur proceed on my work laptop.
Well, back at the desk.
Moved a bunch of stuff in the driveway which led to power washing the part of the house I couldn’t get to before. And part of the driveway and patio. On the plus side, now the patio outside the back door isn’t a hellacious mix of rat, cat, and dog urine smell…
Had to fix the pull cord on the pressure washer first. The T handle broke down and got crumbly. I let the cord get sucked in, so had to disassemble that and then put it all back. Started on the first pull though. I did get a grazing injury to my left hand being stupid and holding something I was trying to clean. Good thing it wasn’t an injection injury. It just scraped the skin off.
Got all the tools and the washer put away, and came in. Family was watching The Martian. I got sucked into that. Ok, feel good movie. Makes a lot more sense when you understand that China funds Hollywood…
I’ll need to spend a bunch more time tomorrow moving stuff on the patio and driveway. It got HOT in the afternoon. The blowback from the pressure washer felt real nice.
n
Site does seem much slower than usual tonight. Long time for the page to reload. Long time for tomorrow’s post to schedule…
n