Kinda grey start to the day, with improvement later… which is what happened yesterday, and we all know that today has a very high probability of being a lot like yesterday. And yesterday did get to be pretty nice by the end of the day.
I did some pickups. I did some shopping. I might have purchased a Christmas present for someone. But the list of things I didn’t do is long…
We ate the slow cooker barbacao and it was good. It’s a nice break from ground beef or chicken tacos or fajitas. I still have to vac pack the cooked ground beef today and freeze it.
Someone that isn’t me has to plan a couple of meals for the in-laws too, who arrive later today. My wife and kids will be taking them to the BOL Friday afternoon, and I’ll join them Saturday evening. I have my non-prepping hobby potluck Christmas dinner Saturday afternoon and I don’t have any interest in missing it.
So I’ll be working my list today, and probably letting things slide. Kids need to be back at school, having had dinner, by 5pm so they can help with a concert and dance show. I will probably drop them off. Or I might try a different pair of active hearing protectors. I’ve got a set of in ear Axils to try, and a set of passive Surefire in ear “Ear Defenders”.
The Axils are very transparent when just sitting around the house. I can set them to just amplify enough that it is like I don’t have them in. I haven’t tested them against loud sounds yet though. Nor have I tested the bluetooth linking ability. They have a stiff wire that goes over your ear to provide stability, and they are linked by a wire and electronics modules that passes behind your head. They are pretty comfortable though.
None of the earbuds I’ve mentioned are ‘noise cancelling’ but instead actively amplified hearing protection that cuts out the amplification when there is a loud sound, which allows the tight fitting earpiece to attenuate the sound and protect your ears. I’ve got a pair of Walker electronic ‘over the ear’ style protectors too. Most of the time, I just wear actual hearing protectors, either foam or finned, and I’m used to them from my years in noisy work environments. It would be nice to have something that would protect but not hinder, especially in social environments, like school plays or recitals…just sayin’….
Other projects might be making progress, there are antenna towers in two different auctions this month. I’ve got 30ft of aluminum truss that I could use as a tower at the BOL, but I’d prefer something that was actually designed as an antenna tower if I can get it cheap.
Still lots to do at the BOL, so some things are back burnered, but I still have my eyes open.
I hope you are also working to constantly improve you situation. Coming up, that might be enough to keep you even…
Stack it up my friends.
nick
71F and very damp. Sun looks like it’s coming up, so maybe not as overcast a start to the day as the past couple. D1 has dentist or orthodontist appt. this morning so that will take some of my time. Wasn’t on MY calendar. [insert Greta face]
n
@Greg: Finally caught up on AdventOfCode today. I found day 7 challenging. Wrote everything recursive, which is always fun, but building up a recursive representation of a file system from supposed terminal commands…oof…
I am (almost) really happy with the Sony WF-1000XM3 earbuds that I have. The performance is excellent, you can have anything from noise-cancelling to nothing to re-transmitted ambient sound. I really like the fact that you can adjust an equalizer, I can roughly compensate for the frequency-gap in my hearing.
I am only “almost” happy, because apparently I have small ear canals, and I can’t get them fully in place. So they don’t sit securely in my ears.
Griner sprung.
Spoiled priveleged LBGQRST BIPOC who did the crime higher priority than non-alphabetic Paul
Whelan.
The PLT’s rejoice.
Admit it – you are just jealous we have the Great Saban and you don’t…
Griner was stupid, getting herself into that predicament. Guess what, the whole world does not follow US law, and the whole world does not grant special privileges to someone who can play the LGBT card or the race card.
That said, it kind of is the responsibility of embassies to try to retrieve citizens from stupid situations. The embassy could always send her a bill for their time and effort. They probably won’t, but they really should…
plugs is on TV squawking about Griner‘s mistreatment, unjust law, yet we have Federal law against Skunk Cabbage. He mentioned Whelan, but like drwilliams said, too bad ya WHITEY! Guess he couldn’t swing Griner before the midterms. And, why give a national podium to Griner’s “wife”? Griner committed a crime in Russia.
We got to Dallas last night on a half tank of gas. Suck it, Tesla!
Flipping through the LSM channels in the room (glutton for punishment), they are all yoohooing Griner’s release in exchange for the “Merchant of Death”. I guess they saving Whelan for 2024.
@Nick: As Norman said, the thingy is almost certainly the mirror collimation tool.
Very easy to do, lots of videos on youtube.
An inexpensive planisphere is a nice thing to have, btw, and I always keep an extra around to give away.
My father taught me the navigation stars and major constellations, but the other stuff…(I mean, Vulpecca?)
https://www.amazon.com/Night-30°-40°-Large-North-Latitude/dp/0961320753/ref=d_bmx_dp_8cd0j22n_sccl_3_6/144-8235349-3234004?pd_rd_w=zu5DF&content-id=amzn1.sym.03cddf99-60da-42aa-a88d-bfc8f7064d69&pf_rd_p=03cddf99-60da-42aa-a88d-bfc8f7064d69&pf_rd_r=ZKB9NWP9W7R9ZZY50A1Z&pd_rd_wg=ua5wO&pd_rd_r=f52164e7-a848-4a96-bd76-cd1a9f26f246&pd_rd_i=0961320753&psc=1&tag=ttgnet-20
Observation report: The skies were reasonably clear, and the occultation of Mars by the moon occurred right on time.
I used a little 90mm scope with just enough power to keep the entire moon in the field of view, which is about 60 X. This clearly resolves Mars into a disc – Mars is at about opposition so it’s about as big as it’s going to get this year – and not so much moon light was collected so as to be blinding.
About a 13X long count of “one mississippi, two mississipi,…” to disappear after initial contact.
My brother up in Carson City saw it happen about five minutes after I did, and similiarly the reappearance was a few minutes delayed.
“In one crater and out the other” he said.
Based on the previous three coaches, I find no fault in your statement.
But the mullahs say that the entire United States is the Great Saban.
DM is reporting the Saudi Prince brokered the Grindr(lol) deal. I guess the murderous Prince is plugs’ bestie again.
I was tempted to use Expect for that one to refresh those skills.
I’m beyond buried at work, and we have conference calls from ~ 7 AM to 10 PM about one really hot issue.
Hilton Anatole area?
The grocery store is around the corner from Parkland/UT Southwestern, where both my Kennedy and my father-in-law died.
That’s a spooky part of town. We spent Spring Break there in March.
That coach name is possibly more radioactive in Florida than Jimbo’s.
And they’re still digging through the financial rubble in Tallahassee.
Oh, Christmas tree. Oh, Christmas tree …
The Frisco Embassy Suites. Several thousand attendees and they didn’t cater lunch. The only thing left is the bar and coffee shop. They have bfast and that is it. Sad.
OK:
Karine Jean-Pierre defends Biden’s shameful cave to Putin, inspires zero confidence in admin’s priorities
Black Homo woman US hater best of America.
Naughty Marine rot in Hell. BCD so screw him.
FJB.
289 miles to the hotel..
Half a tank.
Suck it Tesla.
Sadly, those suburbs are really sterile so the non-hotel options for eating are even more depressing.
We went out to the National Videogame Museum during Spring Break, and we left the place around lunchtime. The best I could come up with for my kids was a Chick Fil A, and that was 20 minutes from the museum.
It may not make economic sense, but I’m still looking forward to our Ioniq. “Gas” ought to be basically free, coming off the solar cells. Of course, for the price over a gas-powered car, we could buy a lot of gas. That’s where it probably doesn’t make sense. Still looking forward to it…
That’s assuming we ever get the darned thing. Hopefully January, February at the latest…
“C++ overtakes Java in language popularity index”
https://www.infoworld.com/article/3682141/c-plus-plus-overtakes-java-in-language-popularity-index.html
“C++ ranks higher than Java in the Tiobe language popularity index for the first time ever, dating back to 2001. Java slipped to a new low in the latest edition of the index.”
“The December 2002 Tiobe Programming Community Index has C++, ranked third, surpassing Java, ranked fourth. It is the first time in the history of the index that Java has not ranked in the index’s top three languages.”
C (16.56%) and C++ (11.94%) together are 28.5%.
It may not make economic sense, but I’m still looking forward to our Ioniq. “Gas” ought to be basically free, coming off the solar cells. Of course, for the price over a gas-powered car, we could buy a lot of gas. That’s where it probably doesn’t make sense. Still looking forward to it…
That’s assuming we ever get the darned thing. Hopefully January, February at the latest…
What is the price of regular unleaded gasoline in Switzerland ?
That’s assuming we ever get the darned thing. Hopefully January, February at the latest…
Keep us posted once everything is in place. I’m curious how many panels you have and how much of a car charge you can get.
C++ has matured a lot better than Java.
C++03 marked the first time the language was usable, with HP freeing the STL rights previously held by SGI to allow a Standard Library with things like a real string class, and C++11 introduced closures along with a standard shared pointer class, which greatly enhanced the utility of the “batteries included” portion of the language.
Among the third party libraries, Boost has become really important, particularly for manipulating time/date information in performance critical situations like Wall Street.
Java introduced more C++ type features, but it has never done Windows GUIs well – a place where it could have been really important – and it really lost its purpose in the age of microservices with coordinated upgrade cycles.
Plus Java is friggin’ wordy. Opening an ASCII file, for instance, used to require instantiation of three separate objects and opening in a particular order. I don’t know if things have changed.
I too will be interested to hear your thoughts when you finally get it and have lived with it for a while. It and the Kia EV6 are the two EV’s that are intriguing to me at the moment.
and so it begins?
It’s easy, relatively risk free, and gonna grow like wildfire….
n
I stumbled across the 2TB drive that came with the old PC. That I replaced with a 1TB SSD four years ago. I bought a SATA to USB gizmo. Sure, I could have just bought a new USB DVD drive for about the same money… but… I have a working drive in the old PC so for as much as I use the DVD why not pull it out of the case? Bonus is the gizmo lets me access various SATA drives.
So the 2TB comes up real slow in Explorer. Once, while trying to open a folder it crashed this PC. Then Win11 wants to run chkdsk. Chkdsk runs to about the ⅓ point and just sits.
I downloaded the Western Digital utility and for other than reading the SMART info, that was a waste of time.
I’ll try the drive on another PC before I make a set of wind chimes with the platters. No complaints, I had six years of use on the 2TB drive.
So exciting, much wow.
>> That said, it kind of is the responsibility of embassies to try to retrieve citizens from stupid situations.
Where’s the stupid situation here? Too busy being a pseudo “celebrity” to check your suitcase for what you surely know is contraband in the country you are traveling to?
Stupid books, stupid movie, and hey, stupid actress. Whodathunkit?
The role she’s playing is a STARVING wretch.
The quote makes it sound like they just wanted her slimmer because “reasons” probably misogyny and ‘me too’, not the fact that the character should be skin and bones, possibly with wirey muscle, because “bad ass grrl hunter.”
Stayed strong. Fightin’ the patriarchy for the grrlz. And the paycheck. Don’t forget about the paycheck.
n
Inflation Reduction Act:
Biden To Spend Billions Of Taxpayer Dollars Bailing Out Union
$36 billion.
$39 billion more for Ukraine.
$ millions for Green stuff, probably $ billions soon. Hmmm what about those Kalifornia reparations: “I got a $ trillion more to spend”.
No wonder plugs is hiring thousands of IRS gestapo. Who gonna pay for it all?
The IRS agents in Austin are extremely unhappy with the ongoing mask and jab mandates when most private employers have dropped them. That will be an attrition problem eventually.
Where I work, we ended “jab or weekly test” mandates to access the campus in August.
About $1.80/liter, so about $7/gallon. Mostly tax, but those are pretty typical prices for Europe. We drive probably 10k miles/year, so that’s fuel costs of maybe $2k or $2.5k per year, depending on what mileage you want to assume. I figure we’re paying a good $15k or $20k premium for getting an EV. So that’s a lot of years of fuel…
Since I’ve had to teach Java for ages now, that’s the language I’m most familiar with. It’s really not a bad language, and with JavaFX it’s actually quite good for user interfaces. What I dislike is the continual addition of cruft. It’s like they feel like they have to add every feature that any other language has, whether or not it makes any sense. Lambdas. Weakly typed “var” declarations. Records. Etc. Sure, sometimes those allow shorter code, but it’s not *better* code.
I would like to see some serious cleanup. For example, why are the AWT classes still around? No one should have used them for at least 15 years, so throw them into an external library. Now that they have (finally!) fixed the “switch” syntax, deprecate the old syntax and require a compiler option to use it. Remove features. Simplify.
Marvel “Phase Five” is coming and Lawrence wants to keep her role as Mystique when Disney gets into using the X-Men. Her and “Elliott” Page who is still willing to squeeze into the femme Kitty Pride costume for the right money … heck, any money.
If the rumors about “Fleabag” Jones replacing Harrison Ford’s Indiana are true, Disney hasn’t learned a thing from the last three years.
I have CyberPower UPS units. All are the same model.
On the new PC, the software says the UPS load is 29 watts. I’ve seen it up to 45 right after a reboot for a couple of minutes.
On Moa, I’m too lazy or whatever to make a special trip to see what the software says. But the SlimServer crashed. The load is 95 watts.
Both systems have a 5 port Netgear switch and a Ubiquiti NanoBeam.
House adds a Ubiuiti Unifi and a pi for DNS. Plus a small brick for the USB hub.
Moa adds the Ubiquiti “whatever” that connects to the wISP (uses the same kind of power supply as the NanoBeam) and a D-Link router. As a guess, max 5 watts more.
Yeah I know 66 watts isn’t huge. But it adds up. Enough to replace the PC with one like House? Eventually. That PC is pushing ten years old real hard. But not yet. But it’s doable. Just get a couple of USB cases for the SSDs in the machine and it’s all good.
and so it begins?
It’s easy, relatively risk free, and gonna grow like wildfire….
An incredible amount of people are very unhappy with the 2020 and 2022 election results and feel that there was significant cheating going on, especially in the battleground states. They are now expressing their displeasure. And they are not going to move from their battleground states to the conservative states, they were born and raised where they live and will not leave there. The political assassinations may start soon, Rule of .308.
I ran out of Edit time.
I just looked at the i5 that is just like my old PC but with working USB ports. Same UPS model. Just the PC and an LCD monitor, 39 watts.
I need to double check what’s on Moa’s UPS. Is that AMD box using that much extra juice? I hope I have somehow put the speaker bar and the Squeezebox on the battery side of the UPS. I’m pretty sure I did not. Because that AMD isn’t a speed demon and actually feels slower than my old i5 ever did. Same age…. does SlimServer use that much extra power?
A sort of neat feature… dragging from notepad to a web page.
I tend to save tracking numbers in a scratch text file. Easier than digging through the seller’s website. I suppose I could remember to enter the tracking on the USPS site and save the link to the desktop but, no, that’s too easy.
Highlight the tracking number in notepad, drag it to the USPS page. It works BUT it also removes the tracking number from notepad. So don’t save the file when you close it.
Oh yeah, it a W11 thing. Didn’t work on Win7.
C++ has matured a lot better than Java.
C++ is not owned by a crazy company (Oracle) who has sued people (Google) over the use of the language. I regard just about any new project in Java as foolish.
I’ve had serious discussions with Patent attorneys about the implications of that lawsuit. Should Oracle prevail, IBM and AT&T could arguably collect 40 years worth of royalties on the PC BIOS API and Unix/C, respectively.
How many times have you called fopen(). How about the much maligned strcpy()?
Ironically, Oracle would probably owe more royalties than they could conceivably collect for Java. Solaris and the hardware still continued to sell well for a while.
As for Linux, I have a documentary on Linus Torvalds which captured the moment on film when he became a millionaire thanks to VA Linux going public. The look on his face is one of those lightning in a bottle moments which will play well in court.
Linus violated the IP on the Posix API if interfaces can be copyrighted.
Everyone will pay. Remember that giant Atari logo in “Blade Runner”? Replaced by the Death Star in the final “director’s cut”.
Larry Ellison may be the sanest man on the planet. Scary, eh?
COVID-19 drug Paxlovid has been free; next year, sticker shock awaits
In lighter news Cardi B had her butt implants sucked out.
>> It’s easy, relatively risk free, and gonna grow like wildfire….
>> The political ass-ass-inations may start soon, Rule of .308.
Cue Nancy and Chuckie yelling to outlaw rifle scopes in 3, 2, 1…
>> It’s easy, relatively risk free, and gonna grow like wildfire….
>> The political ass-ass-inations may start soon, Rule of .308.
Cue Nancy and Chuckie yelling to outlaw rifle scopes in 3, 2, 1…
BTW, for those who are wondering what the rule of .308 is, here are explanations:
https://store.forwardobserver.com/interview-former-seal-matt-bracken-talks-shtf-and-a-dirty-civil-war/
https://www.forumsforums.com/threads/bracken-what-i-saw-at-the-coup.74830/
I’ve had serious discussions with Patent attorneys about the implications of that lawsuit. Should Oracle prevail, IBM and AT&T could arguably collect 40 years worth of royalties on the PC BIOS API and Unix/C, respectively.
Wait, which lawsuit are you talking about ? Oracle already lost that lawsuit against Google at SCOTUS:
https://www.scotusblog.com/2021/04/google-wins-copyright-clash-with-oracle-over-computer-code/
Just checked, and the meter is flat-lined, confirming that I don’t GAF.
Navy to Accept Recruits with Lowest Testosterone as Recruiting Goal Grows
https://valorguardians.com/blog/?p=134444
That’s the way I read it first, and it makes sense.
My wife got the antibodies for free from the state, but that took some effort.
No special doctor strings involved, just knowing how to push the right buttons.
I’m fried from work this week so I don’t remember.
The added fun is that I have to go to The Lizard tonight for homeowners insurance since our regular company for eight years backdoor cancelled us by sitting on the check for two weeks past the due date.
A lot of insurance companies are looking to reduce their Texas exposure right now. When you get the renewal notice from your carrier, make sure to call the company servicing the mortgage to remind them to send payment ASAP.
BTW, those of you speculating that The Lizard only acts as an agent for homeowners’, that is correct. The new policy will be through Travelers.
Buffett owns a big chunk of Travelers, but not the whole company.
Gotta run — 8:30 conference call.
In other words: pussies.
Part 2 of the Twitter Files
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1601007575633305600.html
Loose lips sink ships.
I will let myself out.
Bari Weiss Shares Twitter Files Part II: The Secret Blacklists
https://redstate.com/jeffc/2022/12/08/bari-weiss-shares-twitter-files-part-ii-the-secret-blacklists-n671080
BFD, Elon.
They all get the Lois Lerner penalty and move on, right?
B.F.D.
>> In lighter news Cardi B had her butt implants sucked out
Thank goodness for the DM, not a story that will show up on CNN.
Ay carumba. Mis ojos!
n
I was listening to Coast to Coast AM on the way home tonight. George was talking to an anti-GMO guy and he related a scary story. It may actually be true.
https://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2022-12-08-show/
Evidently a post doc at Ohio State was working on converting a plant root bacteria to turn plant roots into alcohol so the farmers could use the modified bacteria instead burning the fields. The post doc was using CRISPR to edit the genes in the bacteria. He was wildly successful and came back to his lab after a weekend and all of the plants in his lab were dead. The bacteria had dissolved all their roots. He told his advisor and his advisor called in the EPA. EPA investigated and decided that the bacteria could travel around the globe killing all plant life within a few years. The EPA sterilized the lab.
I have no idea if this is true or a cautionary tale. The guy certainly had an agenda.
https://responsibletechnology.org/gmo20/
Meddling with genes directly is certainly not without dangers. I don’t believe this particular tale, but: WGCW introducing completely new traits into organisms? The consequences will not always be foreseeable.
With current technology, genetic fiddling is in already the reach of any well-equipped home lab, and it’s only going to get easier. Stuff is going to happen, and there’s not a lot we can do to prevent it.
Sunny thoughts on a cloudy day…