Texas morning, hot and humid, followed by Texas afternoon, hotter still. And fwiw, there are a lot more bugs here than at home. More biomes means more bugs I guess.
Got ceilings scraped. Some stuff put away. Got the yard mowed, and in under an hour. Doesn’t look like a baseball stadium, but doesn’t look like a jungle either.
Spent some time floating in the water, and some time eating s’mores and listening to the radio by the fire. Big bright almost full moon meant few stars, and I didn’t see any more meteors. WTWW played today’s post title, and I was surprised when I listened to a song I can sing along with…it’s pretty good advice.
The garden has actual vegetables in it, and will take a bunch of weeding to put it right. The nut grass is relentless and thrives here. I’ve cut back the watering schedule again, as it is clearly too wet and nut grass loves wet. Don’t know if I’ll get to the weeding… but even if I don’t I’ll try spraying it with molasses, as the intarwebs suggest.
That said, I might stay through to Monday. The main benefit is going and standing in the electric co-op lobby until I get to see the person I need to see to proceed with the electrical work. Calling has not worked. The secondary benefit would be time in the garden Sunday evening AFTER the sun stops trying to boil my brains in my head.
Playing that decision by ear, and with an eye on the septic system. We’ll see.
In the mean time, I hope everyone is still stacking…
nick
Dew points here for the next five days will be in the low 70‘s with temperatures in the mid to high 90’s. It’s going to be a very warm and uncomfortable week. Yard was mowed yesterday so should be good for 10 days until it gets cooler. Of course riding is not that difficult, it is the weed trimming, quit a bit of it, that gets uncomfortable.
I have a low end Kindle Fire 7″ which I’ve found will play movies ripped for iPhone in HandBrake loaded onto an SD card.
I haven’t found a homebrew ripped movie that the built-in player won’t handle, but I side load VLC too via FDroid.
The tradeoff is the privacy invasion.
76 F this morning in the west side of Fort Bend County. Water is draining off the roof so we hit the dew point. Gonna be a hot one today, we honestly hit 100 F yesterday.
I have ripped about 200 CDs on to my home PC. But I need to build my new home PC as the sound on my motherboard is fried and the sound card fried itself six months ago. No sound on YouTube videos, etc.
I sure do like having all those CDs on a thumb drive in my truck. But the quality sucks as my CDs were not pristine and skip. I use FreeRip on Windows.
Man, my todo list jumps at N+1 every time I finish a task at the house or office. I need to figure out how to get my phone to take pictures of the garage queen so I can open up the space. For some reason, all the pictures on my phone are now WMF instead of JPG. Progress !
Binge the Bosch series on Amazon yesterday along with finishing Picard with the wife. Picard was crazy. Bosch is awesomely well done even if I can’t read the books, too graphic.
“Picard” missed so many opportunities to do something cool in the second season. I felt like I did whilewatching the “Twin Peaks” reboot.
When Jay Karnes came down the stairs in Whoopi Lite’s bar, I thought “Picard” was about to redeem itself. I said the naughty word that got me fired.
“OH F**K!”
My wife asked, “Is he a Q?”
“No. Much better. Maybe.”
‘Maybe’ went nowhere.
i have a set of minis in the bedroom to play sleep music. A couple of sleep apps don’t have the specific button to connect to the pods. If I try the iPhone control panel button to connect, the pods will only connect to the last source that I connected with an app with the connect button.
After some googles, I found you can connect the current app by holding the phone on top of a pod. You have to turn on handoff in the settings, but it works for apps that don’t have the specific connect button.
Give iTunes a try. It did a surprisingly good job and can make several different formats. I store mine on the computer as AAC files. iTunes can export to MP3 files quite nicely.
As for listening in a vehicle I have an Sirius/XM subscription. Truck can use MP3 CDs, link to my iPhone, or use a thumb drive. There is also a video connection (yellow, red, white) so I guess a DVD player could be hooked up. I suspect that function disables when the truck is in motion.
My next vehicle will have CarPlay for Apple integration. I think I would like it. Biggest concern is more crap to take the eyes off the road.
I reset my MacBook back to factory to try and resolve the issue with the music on the HomePod. I have to spend some time getting things back to where they were. No files were lost thanks to Time Machine. Software installs were quick and easy. Not much on this machine anyway.
I started awhile back binging from S01. When I got to S03, MrsAtoz sat down to check it out. After one episode, I had to rewatch from S01 or get the FOD from the Mrs. we’ll done show. Picard, not so much.
2022 Sky Net comes online:
Google engineer warn the firm’s AI is sentient: Suspended employee claims computer programme acts ‘like a 7 or 8-year-old’ and reveals it told him shutting it off ‘would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot’
Game over, man, game over.
He got caught up in his LARPing with it! I don’t believe that sentient AI is possible. It can have vast memory and speed for sorting, and be programmed for mimicry, but everything it does is something it was told to do in its programming. I think it is all what Google’s PR guy says:
Thanks to the YouTube algorithm, FAQ for all food stack storage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekH3YnLV9nc
Airtight glass tips start at 29:23, Vac sealing at 33:40. Link for printable pantry building PDF from channel owner.
Talk about falling on your face:
Scott Johnson at Powerline writes about the U of MN Law School’s (his alma mater) recent webinar on the leaked Alito draft:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/06/dear-dean-mcgeveran-a-footnote.php
Hasday’s title says it all…not.
Here’s Doeflinger:
Yup. Alito quotes the same fella quoted by Blackmun, and that’s a scandal.
The left is so morally and intellectually bankrupt.
The chair generally shapes the Justice, but the next occupant of the Roe chair may not be up to the task of reversing the reversal during her tenure. That’s the fear right now on the Left.
They may have done more damage to their prospects of getting favorable and defensible majority opinions out of that chair by pushing Justice Jackson than Trump would have putting Elian Gonzalez lawyer there.
@Nightraker, Thank you for that. Since I have to keep my jars, it just makes sense to put them to work storing food even when they are “empty” and waiting for me to pull them out for canning. The empties currently take up space 3 ft wide x 6 ft tall by 15 inches deep. The other nice thing about using them is that I will be able to actually see what is in them at a glance – they are in a dark closet so light won’t be a problem. That visual will make things a lot easier to find quickly.
This past year, as shortages have continued, I’ve started looking at how I can improve and increase our preps. One of our sons came recently, and brought 10 lbs of beans and 10 lbs of rice. He said his grown children are getting nervous, they have never encountered inflation, much less inflation with shortages. He said that he had told them to remember they can come here to us if they ever need to.
None of my bunch are preppers. They’ve indulged me, but since they all live in cities, and not on the coast, they never saw the need to keep more on hand than for a couple of weeks. So it says something that they are giving thought to how they would get by, where they would go, etc.
Next weekend is a Federal holiday weekend for Juneteenth. If you need something done out of the bureaucracy, better to try Monday than after noon on Thursday.
-shrug- First prove to me that you are sapient* and not just an algorithm backed by a database of made-up details about house and neighbors.
* Sapient – capable of self-awareness – and not sentient – able to sense the world. There’s a reason our species is called Homo sapiens sapiens, not Homo sentiens.
Re-kindled inflation, war and threats of war, and actual store shortages are alarm bells for the long, long predicted currency collapse. The bells were only a little tinkle when Nixon made the Dollar all Fiat all the time. We even have Venezuela as an example of the path to come. It is fortunate indeed that history doesn’t proceed at the pace of a book or movie but the time available for preparations seems shorter with every news cycle.
Enjoy these good old days as much as possible since those predictions and aftermath are grim indeed.
ADDED: Getting the Saudis to accept only Dollars was a masterstroke that extended the game. Libya and Iraq selling oil for other currencies brought them savage retribution. Now, Russia is eschewing Dollars. Hmmm.
Got the demo completed on the tub surround for the downstairs bath. We will not complete installation of the new tub surround prior to the volunteers arriving. There are other critical tasks (having enough floor space for four air mattresses) taking precedence.
we will endeavor to complete the install this week.
What I can get done today is church, a lot of laundry, deep cleaning, and insulate/ vapor barrier the surround cavity. I need to turn off water for a bit to remove the bath fixtures. Yes we certainly should have done that first. I lacked the strength and husband was on a mission. I did much of the demo then reached a point where brute strength and (for me) overhead power tool work. My much taller husband took over.
The back wall of the surround has a window. The metal of the opening / closing mechanism more or less disintegrated in our hands. Not rusted. Looked like fractured porcelain but was metal. So I coaxed out all the broken bits so the window would close with a flush surface.
I have anti mold white spray paint. Since window will be covered in the inside surface but visible from exterior of house, I’m considering painting it with aforementioned spray paint. While intent is to rip entire room to studs and do tile selected by my husband, replacing tub with walk in shower, I’m a realist and alert to our many flaws. Notably our good intentions that take longer to come to fruition than planned.
So. Spray paint window. Insulate and vapor barrier as though a wall. Use spray foam appropriately. Permanently seal window closed. Replace it when we do the entire bathroom.
Its an exterior wall that gets sun, hard rain, wind. That side of the house takes the brunt of nature’s foibles. Faces backyard.
I‘m paying a friend to help clean surfaces today. Looking forward to avoiding up-down-up-down of ladder.
Our daughter and her friends were enlisted in cleaning and gardening efforts yesterday. They moaned their way they the paltry list of house chores. Took great delight in assembling a couple of Costco raised beds, liking, filling with soil, peat, perlite. Got gloriously dirty mixing. Then seed planting and petunias I picjed up from the $2 rack at home depot. I hope everything grows. They worked hard.
I also unpacked a dozen boxes of media in past couple of weeks. We had iTunes much of it years ago. For reasons dumping all of the physical won’t happen. Compromise is put the media in sleeves on shelf and dump the empty cases. The dozen small size Uhaul boxes not fit in 60 linear inches of shelf space. 12 boxes resulted in close to twenty kitchen sacks of detritus. Win.
We continue to stack the things. I need time to understand and organize stuff in the garage. Not happening this week. That’s a multi day all day endeavor. I have most stuff in proximity to like stuff. I’d like to dump half of it. Not likely to happen as this is already a fraction of pre-move.
Persisting.
@nick
Whims are good.
This is really interesting. From Watts Up With That blog. I try to always read the comments for any article posted there – it’s like here: so many people with deep knowledge of the subject matter add to the conversation:
Elevated CO2 and the Enhancement of Plant Medicinal Properties
We aren’t talking about me, but about machines. Still: What proofs would you believe? I know you don’t believe the author of Hebrews, do you also disbelieve Descartes: “dubito, ergo sum “?
Well, I’ve been up for a while but busy with doing nothing 😛
Currently 91F and 57%RH with a steady strong breeze and an absolutely clear blue sky. Gorgeous in other words.
Coffee on the dock, and slowly, in other words.
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always glad to hear that others are stacking, and making progress.
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WRT google, it’s been several years since they first reported ‘emergent’ behaviour in their network and machines. If they are to be believed, and I’D be hiding any evidence I created Skynet, not bragging about it, they are seeing behaviours that are NOT programmed or taught, and have been for several years at least. That’s millenium in machine time.
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finished the first Bobinverse book last night. Will read the rest. Liked it.
—- given today’s late start, likelihood of staying the extra day is high. Lots to get done today to stay on track.
Better get to it.
n
I’m not buying sentience but they may have some extremely good natural language processing based on neural networks which they can’t adequately explain. Google doesn’t want to be viewed as just another tech company with a search engine.
@Lynn
I use these <https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B002GHBYZ0/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1>=&tag=ttgnet-20; for sound on all my computers. They work well. Plug into any USB port and work with Windows and Linux. They are going for $26 (Canadian) so should be cheaper in the USA. Cheaper than a new mother board.
Failure of subsystems like an audio interface or Ethernet port are a bad sign for a motherboard. If you are not absolutely dependent on Windows 7 or XP for something mission critical, consider replacing the board to prevent problems later.
I recently swapped a motherboard in my kids gaming PC, but Microsoft accepted the change without requiring me to buy a new Windows 10 license. Linux isn’t a problem … for now. And AMD makes swapping the board a lot less painful than Intel.
Most of y’all are old enough to remember road trips when your car got covered by bug splats. That has almost entirely gone away, due to all the damned pesticides in use. This cannot be a good thing.
Where we live now is away from cultivated areas. We have bug splats again. This is good.
Give iTunes a try. It did a surprisingly good job and can make several different formats. I store mine on the computer as AAC files. iTunes can export to MP3 files quite nicely.
FreeRip does great on a new CD. A lot of my CDs have been used and are scratched. Nothing will do a great job on a scratched CD.
I’ve never lived deep inside a big city, but we still have plenty of bugs in the parts of Texas and in Oklahoma I’ve lived in & traveled in. How many we see, and how many splat on the windshield, depends on timing, and on food sources, and on whether it is a wet or dry year. Also, there are a LOT more visible bugs near the water! Different bugs swarm and fly at different times of year. Different kinds of bugs eat different foods – just like bees have preferred food crops at different times of year.
When the time and/or food source is right, they cover our windshields and grills, they swarm at porchlights, they come into the yard and eat every leaf on the plants they like, they crunch underfoot when we walk in a parking lot, they will invade the house if we leave a door open….
We have an exterminator who comes every year to inspect for termites and wood ants. He comes in May, because that is when termites swarm. The rest of the year, no one ever sees them, as they live underground.
He comes again in July to spray our pecan trees for pecan weevils, because that is the time of year they hatch from underground and climb the trees to lay eggs in the nuts. With no pecan trees, we’d never see pecan weevils.
On the coast, during love bug season, sometimes they would cover the lenses of our car lights to where we had to clean them off before driving at night. Up here, it is crickets at night that cover the parking lots and the entries to businesses by the thousands, jumping on us as we try to walk through them.
Here, the grasshoppers some years are like locust plagues and they eat everything. Later in the summer, cicada season happens – I hear the cicadas in the east will actually swarm, but here they just live in the trees, and we rarely see them until they die, but we sure do hear them! In west Texas, we sometimes had the millipede migration – millions of little bugs.
Some years, webworms are real bad in the trees, and you see their cotton candy looking webs up and down the streets. I stay on top of ours and remove and burn them as soon as I spot them. Otherwise, they can denude a tree.
CDParanoia on Linux has done the job for me when all else has failed, but it is a shell based tool.
Someone may have successfully ported it to Windows, but I don’t keep up.
My truck has a USB port from the radio. The cig lighter sockets are off when the ignition is off. The USB port is hot and while my phone complains about “slow charging”, I can charge if needed.
I bought a 32 GB USB 2.0 SanDisk flash drive. It’s not much more than a nub enough to pull it out when installed. What would happen if it’s plugged in and powered all of the time?
I’d guess that the current draw of the USB flash drive is less than the blinking red light the dashboard when the vehicle is locked. For instance, on 2019 Highlander, there’s a flashing red LED light that indicates the doors are locked. Stays on while ignition is off.
Quick research on the googles says a USB 2 drive draws about 24mA when idle.
It should be fine. I have a flash drive I keep plugged into my car to store MP3 files, and, in four years, it has only been unplugged a couple of times to put new music into the storage.
Since the pandemic started, the car generally only gets turned over once a week, but, now that I think about it, I’m not sure if that port is live with the ignition off.
If you’re worried about something catching fire, SanDisk right off the shelf at Sam’s/Target/Costco shouldn’t present a problem. If anything, the drive will simply stop working.
The flash drives are durable, however. The one in my car even went through the washer in a jeans pocket once, and the car gets left outside in Texas heat from time to time.
I ripped my CDs with EAC to 192VBR. I can hear a slight difference if I’m using headphones. A very faint clipping of highs. But I don’t know if that’s a case of the PC’s CD drive outputting better than PC decoding wav files. … it goes through the same sound card. Shrug. 192VBR is “close enough” for my ears.
For my LPs I found torrents because why repeat the work?
I do have a bit more than what I own but that’s a case of “everything by the Carpenters” in one torrent file or some albums I couldn’t find so I snagged the “Greatest Hits Of All Time” instead.
Windows says 126 GB in 271 folders. That includes the album art. But, for an example, in REM, there are eight albums in that folder.
I’m not worried about a flash drive killing my battery. I suspect the blinking burglar light on the dash and the receiver for the remote locks take much more power.
But Greg says it should be OK. And yeah, it cost all of $12 from Big River. Haven’t thought of a fire, just of how long the drive will last if powered all of the time.
For all I know, the radio’s USB port turns off after a while. Like the dome lights. I suppose I need to roll the window down and reach in without opening a door.
I leave my USB full of music plugged into the port in my center console in the Expy. No mention of not doing so anywhere that I’ve seen.
USB drives are free if you have a Microcenter near you. Get on their email list, then don’t go in for a couple of months and they’ll send you a coupon for a free drive or microSD to get you to come into the store. I used that to upgrade the cards in my cameras. I think the current email said 32GB drive.
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got the last hall bedroom ceiling scraped, patched, and textured, and the hallway ceiling too. No dust. I used my airless paint sprayer to wet the ceiling, and create a heavy fog mist of water in the air during the scraping and cleanup. I will need a new HEPA filter for the shop vac though.
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still beautiful here. Wife and kids are headed home. I’m staying for the extra day.
I’m taking a break to cool off and clean stuff up. Hard to do when the wife and kid are working in the same space.
Thermometer says 104F in mottled shade, 36%RH. It’s nice with the breeze, in the shade, not working….
Think I’ll wait a bit before weeding the garden.
n
I use these <https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B002GHBYZ0/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1>=&tag=ttgnet-20; for sound on all my computers. They work well. Plug into any USB port and work with Windows and Linux. They are going for $26 (Canadian) so should be cheaper in the USA. Cheaper than a new mother board.
I have a new motherboard, case, cpu, ram, ssd, power supply, etc. Just got to get off my butt and put it all together.
I bought a 32 GB USB 2.0 SanDisk flash drive. It’s not much more than a nub enough to pull it out when installed. What would happen if it’s plugged in and powered all of the time?
I buy these 128 GB Samsung USB drives for $21. Works perfectly in my truck and my home pc. I leave it in my truck USB drive for months.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07D7PDLXC?tag=ttgnet-20/
I do have a problem with my truck radio. It has trouble indexing the drive allowing you to use the radio interface to select a song or an album. But, the voice interface works just fine, IF, it understands the artist that I am asking for. The voice interface does not do east Texas very well.
“U.S. senators reach deal on gun legislation in aftermath of Uvalde shooting”
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/06/12/senate-uvalde-gun-john-cornyn/
“Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, was one of the lead negotiators for the proposal, which would expand background checks for people under 21 and encourage states to enact “red flag” laws. Biden and House Democrats had wanted to go further.”
I don’t know if I approve. I do not want to affect Kyle Rittenhouse’s ability to buy a weapon.
Try formatting the flash drive with FAT32 instead of VFAT. Real FAT32.
Then arrange the directory hierarchy / – Artist/ – Album/ – “nn – Track Name.mp3” where track is the position on the CD.
Transfer the albums one at a time.
That’s what I had to do to make the radio interface work for Toyota’s “infotainment” system.
Most of the Linux CD rippers build directory hierarchies like I described above.
Keep a backup of the flash somewhere. Of course, I’m in trouble there right now since I retired my MacBook Pro 2007 running Pop OS! until the sleep starts working properly again in Linux. That machine was where I did all of my CD ripping for the car since it has a very new Super Drive circa 2018.
A co-worker from the tolling company job who still communicates with me now works at Canonical in development, and I occasionally hit him up for someone to take a look at the sleep issue. The problem is common to all Ubuntu variants on that machine.
@Pecancorner
It’s worthwhile to save the front insert and the track listing insert on the back. If you’ve never done it, the case back can be easily popped away from the cd holder. By saving the inserts you can always put them in a new jewelcase and have the original form restored.
“New Zealand Introduces a Climate Change Meat Tax”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/06/09/new-zealand-introduces-a-climate-change-meat-tax/
Mess with the farmers at your own risk.
@Lynn
Novus 7100 Plastic Polish Kit. Three 8-oz bottles, about $24. For mild scratches start with #2 and finish with #1. If heavier start with #3 and work up. It’s basically the same finishing steps for restoring headlight lenses, you just don’t start with wetordry sandpaper.
@greg:
Wouldn’t work for me, because I have a few SACDs, which are effectively dual-layer DVDs, with one layer a CD. A SuperDrive is effectively a DVD, I think, so it will preferentially read the DVD layer, which carries a proprietary-encoded multi-channel audio signal that most CD rippers don’t understand.
That’s why I use an external USB CD drive for audio ripping – cheap, no-name, but it works.
For ripping software, I use AudioGrabber, which will communicate with FreeDB (and before that, GraceNote) for track metadata, even though my preferred metadata format is not most people’s.
G.
@Brad
If you can get RainX that will make them easier to clean off.
Texas may be setting a new all time peak of 75,000 MW demand right now. The solar is producing almost 10,000 MW most of the day and the wind turbines are producing 20,000 MW. The four nukes and the natural gas and coal plants are easily making the rest. The previous all time peak is 74,820 MW in August 2019.
https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards
@Lynn
I should call their offices Monday and encourage them to add a provision to allow National Gurad members 18-21 to resign in disgust with no penalties.
Stupid hypocritical ashholes will send them overseas to get shot at over oil or some Bush/Cheney-esque excuse like “nation building”, but they can’t buy an underpowered rifle because it looks scary.
To be clear, I don’t expect it will ultimately hold up in court, and they may not even have to challenge it after decisions this term.
Re: bugs – I’ve used this to remove dried-on bugs after a long trip before I wash the car: . Works well. Also removes tar splotches. Doesn’t appear to harm finish.
Re: hard-boiled eggs – I got the “Dash Rapid Egg Cooker” that was recommended here a few days ago. This one . Worked quite well. I did hard-boiled, and they came out just right (very slightly soft egg yolk), and were easy to peel after cooking (I put them in cold water for a couple of minutes after cooking was finished).
Nothing will do a great job on a scratched CD.
Novus 7100 Plastic Polish Kit. Three 8-oz bottles, about $24. For mild scratches start with #2 and finish with #1. If heavier start with #3 and work up. It’s basically the same finishing steps for restoring headlight lenses, you just don’t start with wetordry sandpaper.
I may need to do that with my 2008 Highlander. Owning four vehicles is a pain in the buttocks.
@Lynn
Check YouTube for videos. If you’re just doing one vehicle, it’s not difficult to do by hand if you are young and haven’t worn out your grip. Otherwise, get the power tool setup.
@brad:
Reminds me of the old joke about a Microsoft developer who had to sell his car, “because he couldn’t debug the Windows”.
G.
Re Headlight Restorers – I’ve used these Headlight Restore Wipe on two vehicles. Worked easy and fast.
Back from Disney yesterday. 10 hour drive that was fairly easy. we only hit a few slow downs in Atlanta, which is expected. We stopped at our first Buc-ee’s, located off I75 south of Atlanta. As soon as we pulled off the interstate and onto the exit, we had second thoughts. Traffic was backed up for a 1/4 mile. We pressed on, and were able to find a pump with no waiting. We went inside and holy chaos Batman. the place was a zoo. Lines for the bathrooms, with the line going right in the middle of the store. All sorts of traffic congestion by the registers, and just general chaos. Seriously, it was so crowded it made me think Disney traffic was light the past week. We just grabbed some ready made sandwiches, drinks, and bolted. I’m good for a lifetime now. I guess I just don’t get it.
As for Disney, my mid trip report holds true. Without access to DAS, we wouldn’t have been able to ready nearly as many rides. It’s fairly obvious Disney is manipulating everything to get more people to pay to ride. Not a good trend.
Crowd levels were insane. I’m not sure if it’s actual crowd size or the fact that less people overall are riding rides. If it’s the latter, Disney has a serious problem.
The new Guardians of the Galaxy ride is seriously great. We rode it twice. It’s knocked Rock ‘n’ Rollercoaster off the top of our list.
The two new Star Wars rides were ok. There is no way I would wait in line for either. Part of it is because we prefer coaster rides. Another part is basing everything on the sequel trilogy. I just don’t care. I’ve also never was a Han Solo fan (I want more Jedi and lightsabers dang it), so seeing a big Millennium Falcon is just meh for me. It is well done, as is the entire land – very detailed.
I enjoyed Toy Story land more. Toy Story Mania is a favorite, and we rode it multiple times. We were at HS for rope drop one morning, and mad a beeline to ride it first. in the past, we’ve made it quick enough to just walk on. This time, not only did we do that, but we were in the first car of the day (we let a mom and her little boy have the honor of first riders of the day). When we finished, there still wasn’t anyone waiting to ride, so the cast members let us stay on and ride again – that’s never happened to us before, and was really cool. The new Slinky Dog Dash coaster is great. It’s intended for little kids, but I enjoyed it too. Very smooth and a fairly long ride. That ride consistently had 90+ minute waits.
Pandora in AK was well done (I still haven’t seen the movie), but I wasn’t wowed by the rides. We had passes for them, so no waiting. We were there at rope drop, so we rode Everest, then my son and I walked on immediately again to ride. Getting older sucks, as two in a row is all my inner ears can take now, apparently. He rode it 3 more times, with only a short 10 min wait for the last ride.
MK was packed, but with Tron not ready, no big time sink of a line, except for the Seven Dwarfs coaster. It’s just meh for us, and we didn’t ride it. We had a pass to ride, but it was down when our time came. We rode Space Mountain a lot, along with Haunted Mansion and all our other favorites. Of course my son and I did the teacups, which interestingly don’t give me any motion sickness issues. Of course, I keep my head looking straight ahead – no need to tempt fate. We got a ride on Splash mounting in before the retheme. We also just got lucky and walked onto Peter Pan in the early evening. That ride almost always is a 90+ minute wait time.
The only ride we didn’t get to do that was on our list was the new Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, which was down when we had our passes.
We only used the standby line once, and that was for Tower of Terror. It was an hour wait in the sun on our first day. That really got to my son, so after that we modified our plan and didn’t do any more standby lines. We still rode our normal volume, it just took more work and planning (thanks to my wife who was the genius who made that magic happen).
Mobile food ordering is the best thing Disney has done in a while. Pull up the app, select an arrival time, and place your order. When you are ready, select that you are ready to pick up, and in less than 5 minutes your food is ready. No line, just walk in and pick up. We did that every day for lunch.
Besides the crowds and ride line chaos, the other big negative is the reduction of extra magic hours. One big perk of staying onsite is early and late access to the parks. It used to rotate between parks, and was an hour early each morning. Now it’s every park, but only a half hour. The crowds were also greater at rope drop than I’ve seen. Our last trip 5 years ago was the same week, and it wasn’t nearly this bad. The only park with extra hours now is Magic Kingdom, and it’s not every day. That is a serious hit to the value of staying onsite. We stayed at Boardwalk Villas again, and had a 1 bedroom suite (we got a studio last time). It was amazing how much nicer the 1 bedroom was. Big, plenty of room, and a full kitchen (we made dinner a couple of evenings).
I’m sure we will go back, but it will be several years again, and likely just my wife and I. We will likely just do a couple days and work Disney into a greater overall vacation plan, instead of being the sole destination.
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-engineer-thinks-artificial-intelligence-bot-has-become-sentient-2022-6?op=1&scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4
If the “AI” claims to be trans, that will be a clue.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/kevindowneyjr/2022/06/12/called-it-heres-why-lebron-didnt-want-to-discuss-the-beatdown-murder-at-his-akron-school-n1604989
LeBron doesn’t want to talk about it. Who knows, he might be away learning how to dribble.
How about asking Barry? Would he describe these young men as looking like they could be his sons?
Failure is not an option if Abbott wants to keep his job.
Warner-Robbins, yeah, nothing else is around like Buc-ee’s. The last time I drove through that part of Georgia, south of Macon, I saw billboards advertising strip clubs and not much else.
“Strippers. Need We Say More? Next exit.”
This was before I had a “smart phone” and I didn’t think to bring a camera.
The alternatives are Love’s, which, if you’re there around 3AM, you quickly learn why the place has that name, or Pilot/Flying-J, which is in a state of flux as they are absorbed onto Warren Buffett’s balance sheet.
The point of the change in Extra Magic hours was to have full lines at rope drop in all of the parks and encourage people to pay for ILL.
Agreed. It may tick off Disney diehards, but the parks are printing money right now.
Back from Disney yesterday. 10 hour drive that was fairly easy. we only hit a few slow downs in Atlanta, which is expected. We stopped at our first Buc-ee’s, located off I75 south of Atlanta. As soon as we pulled off the interstate and onto the exit, we had second thoughts. Traffic was backed up for a 1/4 mile. We pressed on, and were able to find a pump with no waiting. We went inside and holy chaos Batman. the place was a zoo. Lines for the bathrooms, with the line going right in the middle of the store. All sorts of traffic congestion by the registers, and just general chaos. Seriously, it was so crowded it made me think Disney traffic was light the past week. We just grabbed some ready made sandwiches, drinks, and bolted. I’m good for a lifetime now. I guess I just don’t get it.
Sounds like the Buc-ees in Luling, Texas on I-10. They have expanded it three times that I know of. The last time that I drove past there on a Thursday afternoon, there must have been 500 cars and trucks in the parking lots. Maybe a 1,000 cars and trucks, it was a madhouse.
Great report, thanks.
n
>> Novus 7100 Plastic Polish Kit. Three 8-oz bottles, about $24. For mild scratches start with #2 and finish with #1. If heavier start with #3 and work up.
That’s what I use to maintain the playfield on my pinball machine.
>> That ride almost always is a 90+ minute wait time.
I just don’t get waiting 90+ minutes for a 5(??) minute ride and repeating it multiple times. But then again was never a big Disney fan. Haven’t been there in over 25 years.
When I lived in bug splat country, I would heavily coat all leading edges with paste wax, and spray a dilute solution of paste wax and mineral spirits on the hard to coat areas. I would wash bugs off ASAP, daily if on a long trip. Their stomachs contain hydrochloric acid that is brutal on most surfaces.
Now, I wonder if it might have been good enough to spray a dilute solution of baking soda at the end of each day.
Few bugs here, but enough that it matters. Don’t leave ’em on for days, especially if humidity is high.
When it came to copying MP3 songs from my PC to a song player, or an SD card, not all songs would have an image of the CD album cover. I would Google search for the CD. the do a copy of the image, and using the app MP3Tag I would use it to open the MP3 of the song and the paste on the image. Then when playing ion my SanDisk player, phone or watch, the image would always be visible.
I have read that wiping headlight lenses with glycol brake fluid (the most common type) does a good job, but I would NOT try it. I have bought used cars with severely clouded lenses, and I start by wet sanding them. Go to finer grits. Finish with various polishing compounds.
CAUTION. Some lenses are coated. My above procedure will destroy the coating. There are some aftermarket coatings that can be applied, and they get good reviews. Some shops simply spray clearcoat, but I would not do this.
Simple? Not at all. All my old cars have glass. Breaks more easily than plastic. Easily replaceable, but some aftermarket Euro light conversions are expensive. TANSTAAFL.
IIRC, for now, that is the last Buc-ee’s on I-10 westbound.
Also, Luling has four of the big BBQ places in Central Texas, and drinks are an afterthought, with some doing BYOB if you want beer. Buc-ee’s is a must-stop for us if we make the trip.
New Braufels is still the biggie with 200 gas pumps, all mostly occupied on holiday weekends. Part of it is being half way between Austin and San Antonio, but the Schlitterbahn and tube rentals should be packing them in once again.
Not for long. The Buc-ee’s being constructed in East TN, off I40 at the off ramp to The Smoky Mountains, will be the largest store In sqft. I have no idea the pump count. No opening date set. The store in Crossville opens June 27 and will be a place to avoid for three or four months.
Just spitballin’ here:
Elon walks from Twitter after the real bot count is revealed.
Buys a half share in Bucee’s
Buys the TVA
Sets up the site in East TN with 500 SuperChargers and feeds it with two 1-meter 14×343 strand cryonic low-O copper cables that double as a magnetic rail launching system.
On first launch a rift into another dimension is opened and we are invaded by zombies that eat PLT brains and kudzu, excrete lithium bricks, and build intradimensional theme parks in their spare time.
theme parks
–as long as the theme isn’t “Slaughter of the humans” I’m good with that…
n
Oh, and an interesting tidbit from our trip. This is the first time we had anything with us that tracked steps. We walked around 53 miles over 5.5 days.
The Mine Train attraction is a big disappointment after the long wait. You’d think they would have learned that a new ride mechanism alone doesn’t a good ride make. You’d also think that they would have a better load and cycle time by now.
I have a nostalgic love for the Peter Pan ride and do it whenever we can just walk on, which is VERY rarely.
Love the three d shooting ride for Toy Story, and the Slinky Dog coaster is really good. THE LINE THOUGH. And all in sun…
n
TEACUPS!!!
Moved a shed this afternoon. I need someplace to park the lawn tractor, out of the sun and weather.
There is an old rickety “potting shed” that is tucked behind one of the other sheds, and it is sitting empty.
So I cut a wall off, and moved it about 1 foot to be more level, and lined up with a sorta path I can drive the tractor thru.
Got to use my HiLift farm jack. Also ended up doing some hydro jetting under the shed to try and get it to sit flat. It’s mounted on 2×6 runners. I was reaching under with a jet nozzle on a pipe to erode the dirt under the skid. Took some time, but less time than digging. I would have had to remove the floor or try to move the shed 8 ft to access it otherwise. It wasn’t moving 8ft.
Tomorrow I’ll see if it was worth it, and how the tractor sits inside it. If the floor holds, and it fits ok, I’ll pressure wash the shed too. Saves a few hundred bucks on a shed or lean to, or even just a cover.
The neighbors hate the shed as it was, and I was either going to cut it up and trash it, but maybe now it will have a reprieve.
(It’s pretty skanky, made from corrugated fiberglas panels and windows and doors from an old camper trailer. Should keep the sun off though.)
– then I got a drink and floated on the lake for an hour as the sun went down.
– I’ve had my dinner and will have a fire, a beverage, and spin the dial on the shortwave for a while.
Beautiful clear night, huge full moon.
n
Catching up.
shun++;
Toy Story Mania, Slinky Dog, and Seven Dwarves weren’t meant to be “E Ticket” attractions appealing to everyone.
What gets me, especially with Toy Story Mania, is how bored the tourists look in the photos in the gift shop.
REALLY nice night.
Shortwave and ham bands sounded great. I ran a wire from my little radio to my flagpole and stations were booming in.
Heard Barbados, Maui, California, Western Canada on 20m, heard BBC and Australia on shortwave, canadian time stations were loud too.
And then I saw a freaking BEAVER. Had to be. Saw the wake coming toward me, grabbed my FLASHLIGHT and lit it up. 3ft long, flat rounded tail, FAT body. I did not know there were beavers in Texas. Swam right under my dock and I got another look from the top. Pretty cool, but initially kinda scary. thought it was a gator at first.
Pretty cool.
n
@drwilliams
It’s worthwhile to save the front insert and the track listing insert on the back
That has been my special task as I have time.
The first season of Bosch on Amazon was amazing.