09:38 – We got an order overnight from Canada, which is the first international order we’ve gotten since at least the first of August. That’s a bit odd. In that period I’d have expected to ship at least ten kits internationally, probably eight of which would have gone to Canada.
Barbara noticed yesterday that the kitchen faucet was loose. When you move the handle, the whole faucet moves. So I crawled up under the sink and checked things out. There’s a metal stud sticking down with a bolt on it, which I’m sure is what clamps the faucet assembly to the counter top. Unfortunately, I don’t have sockets that are deep enough to get to the nut, and there’s no room to maneuver a wrench or pliers. Not to mention that Barbara has little faith in my plumbing skills. I think she’s afraid I’ll try to tighten the nut and end up flooding the kitchen. So I called the plumber, who’s going to stop over tomorrow morning.
As I’ve said before, it irks me to hire someone to do trivial repairs. Hell, I remember the days when I’d have thought nothing of replacing my Jeep CJ’s starter or water pump, or relining the brakes. No more. In the immortal words of Dirty Harry, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”
Back to work building and shipping kits.
Some of my friends are impressed when I occasionally build a computer, but I tell them it is a lot easier than fixing a car. A lot cleaner, too. There isn’t much I won’t do. No wonder I have so little time.
With modern cars, even simple tasks are more involved than they used to be. The last time I took the car in for an oil change, I actually paid to have the air filter replaced. On my first car, I never would have paid someone else to do that. Now changing the air filter is more time consuming than changing oil. I remember replacing the battery on my first car. Now, we have two vehicles, and I am not even sure where the battery is, let alone how to replace it.
A basin wrench is needed. http://www.amazon.com/Superior-Tool-Eleven-Wrench-Infinitely-Adjustable/dp/B0000CBJD4/ref=sr_1_4?s=hi&ie=UTF8&qid=1410190015&sr=1-4&keywords=adjustable+basin+wrench ,
With modern cars, even simple tasks are more involved than they used to be.
I used to all my own maintenance and some small repairs. Actually enjoyed doing such and save some money in the process. That changed many years ago. The last car I had (which got wrecked in an accident by a guy on drugs) I never opened the hood the entire five years I had that vehicle.
I was tired of crawling under vehicles, burning my hands on hot oil, discovering strange fasteners that required odd tools, disposing of the oil and oily rags, sweating during the process, bending over the fender while standing on a foot stool (for my truck), etc. Time to pay someone else to do those tasks. They have the tools, the equipment and disposal facilities.
@Michael Polak
That looks like it’d work, but all I really needed was a deep socket with maybe an extension. I’m not even sure if the nut is standard or metric.
Here’s a look at what to expect in your local PRC after hours:
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (WREG) – CBS affiliate WREG reported that three people are now recovering after a mob of teenagers ran through a busy shopping plaza, seemingly picking out customers and Kroger employees at random to attack.
lol *slap* Take that Obama *slap*
Two Russian strategic bombers conducted practice cruise missile attacks on the United States during a training mission last week that defense officials say appeared timed to the NATO summit in Wales
The bad kind of flash mob?
I want those teenagers to try it on a crowd containing a few SteveF’s. Even me, for that matter, with my by-now-rusty Judo. People who haven’t done martial arts tend to hit their little heads when they fall, how sad.
OFD asked about profile pictures a couple of days ago. I haven’t been ignoring the question so much as wondering what is going on. I notice that my profile pic doesn’t always show up. It doesn’t seem to be tied to whether or not I was logged in at the time.
Actually, the fact that it shows up even if I am not logged in is a bit worrisome. Does it just trust that email address that I enter at the post? Is it doing some other form of identification?
Anyhow, the basic idea is easy enough: WordPress knows about Gravatar. If you create a Gravatar.com account, you can define various email addresses, and associate a picture with each. WordPress should then take the picture and use it when you post.
School employee on snack rules: ‘You cannot buy a Tic Tac in a Nebraska school, I checked’
Pssst! Hey, kid! Wanna buy a bag of Fritos?
It’s raining in Vegas! I’m running outside with my tin cup! 🙂
Got out yesterday and started doing a little Sept 11 prep. Got four more ozarka 35 bottle water cases. Jump started #3 car that is stored at the office, a 97 Honda Civic, and filled it full of gas. Son left it empty last time after borrowing it.
Will be filling other two cars before Thursday. Just in case.
We also got two inches of rain yesterday. The mosquitoes were vicious last night on our two mile walk.
Pshaw. I’m, like, a harmless little bunny. I wouldn’t know what to do in the face of mob violence.
I saw dat nooz on da Russkies playing footsie wid us; pretty funny. They used to do that more seriously with subs and fighter-interceptors over both coasts back in the day; why it makes nooz now is a mystery.
For any plumbing or electrical or roof repairs beyond my most basic skillz and physical condition, we call in the cavalry. Which is coming up soon for the electric stuff. I like to try to fix stuff around the house and vehicles if I can, but sometimes I throw up my hands and call for help. Which is what I’ve done the first coupla weeks at work. That seems to be tapering off now as I settle in and ID everybody and their wittle Windoze problems and issues; today was mostly to do with network stuff and tweaking UPS World Ship sw to work with Windows 8 and FileMaker Pro 9. Next goofball problem was/is fixing an HR dollymop’s email with Exchange 2007 and 2012 AD and then trying to figure out why two pooters see a networked printer and see it as the default printer but “cannot contact over the network.” They shut off the printer and moved it to a different location in the office, and also shutdown and rebooted those two pooters during and after that move, so no doubt I gotta reinstall the bugger on both pooters again; one for the GM/CFO and one for the COO. With Windows 7. Junk like this eats up hours and hours of the day; probably spent another four hours, easy, on just the Shipping Dept. computer again. Which takes priority over the other crap. Ah yes, the life of a Windoze support drone…yea, verily, how the mighty hath fallen…from RHEL clusters w/many hundreds of RHEL servers across two states to this….
Oh why oh why can’t I, at the end of a typical day like this one, stroll through a mall and have a flash mob of teenage cretins try to knock me out or down or whatever…please, Lord…why? You martial arts boyz can probably twist them all into pretzels and play frisbee wid da wittle wascals; but ol’ OFD gonna clothesline the bastids and then stomp on their throats. Maybe snap some knees sideways. OFD beez all old-skool and chit, and still kinda well over six feet and kinda well over 250 wid a short fuse and scary-ass PTSD….
…also a firearm might go off…or some blasting caps…or sumthin…
Dave, I’m sure you are just blowing off steam, so this is not a reminder that the income from any job is better than the income from no job. You of all peeps 🙂
Bravo clotheslining. Lots easier to explain than booms. “Oops, sorry I tripped. You OK? Let me just straighten that for you!”
I’d just hit them with my cane.
Yup, I’m just venting a bit o’ steam here; it is in fact bettuh to pull the same pay I got from my RHEL cluster gig, plus some bennies, plus larn me some new chit and hep peeps an’ bring a smile to their faces each day if I can fix sumthin. Or make tings easier for dem. Several years of doing this, maybe, and then I segue into sumthin else…
Clotheslining is fun stuff if the clowns are running at ya; step aside at the last second and without too much effort sling them to the ground/floor. One of ’em takes a swing at ya? Grab his wrist on the way in and then twist it into a combination wrist-lock and arm bar, wringing it out good as they drop to their knees, then a nice kick to the thorax. My fave ting, though, is if somebody comes up behind and grabs me around the neck; I bend my knees substantially while holding onto their arms, pick them up over my head and throw the buggers. Depending on weight, I may just slam them to the floor. Been a while but I learned these tings at the knee of Dear Old Dad, former Coastie Shore Patrol, and then mil-spec training, followed by cop skool and hands-on gigs in biker bars. The latter was also fun for going in swinging the PR-24 Monadnock Prosecutor baton, long before T.J. Hooker on the tee-vee did it, like a friggin’ helicopter blade; a couple of rounds with that and the bikers and other drunk-ass mofos would stop as soon as they heard it slide outta the steel ring.
For riotous and boffo laffs, every other weekend, just about, during them long hot summuhz in the tropics of central Maffachufetts, we’d get the call that a major brawl had broken out again in Tom’s, a big pub/bar deal right on Route 9 in Westborough, about 30 miles west of Boston. Four or five local towns would send their officers, usually two or three each, plus local deputy sheriffs, and we’d all converge on the scene with the PR-24s, old-skool billy clubs, etc., and just wade right in. Many times the buggers would give as good as they got for a few minutes, but at some point the Staties would show up with German shepherds and then…GAME OVER!!!
Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end, haha…late 70s…revolvers and billy clubs, no Tasers, radios sucked, no computers, and when you smacked somebody around they generally knew they had it coming.
Oh why oh why can’t I, at the end of a typical day like this one, stroll through a mall and have a flash mob of teenage cretins try to knock me out or down or whatever…please, Lord…why?
Probable headlines:
“Teen mob stomps, fatally injures older white man”
“Older white man held in unprovoked attack on black youths in mall”
You get the drift.
And here is kind of a long-winded piece on the ongoing immigration scam operations the globalists have been running on us:
http://humanevents.com/2014/09/08/obama-delays-next-round-of-amnesty-orders-until-after-election/
Of course he’s delaying it. It’s all just a big stupid joke, on us, mainly. And there are probably 30-million-plus illegals already in the country anyway. FatBoy Teddy and his minions and descendants set about all this with malice aforethought and have done their best to ruin the country; just one of their operations, mind you.
Habla Espanol, Senor?
It kinda blows when a town up here dumps its French teacher (we’re just minutes from Quebec, by the way) and replaces her with a Spanish teacher. It also kinda blows when the local Domino’s laminated menu at their store has the back side of it in Spanish and the Lowe’s chain store thirty miles south of here has Spanish all over the place. The latter is about a whole hour from the Quebec border. WTF???
“Probable headlines:”
The first ain’t gonna happen.
The second, yeah, probably. Cops would show up after it was over, of course, and blow my chit away instantly. “He put me in fear of my safety when he took out his handkerchief to wipe his bifocals, Chief!”
“Sarge, the fuckin guy was seven feet tall! Looked like Haystack Calhoun comin’ at me! I had no choice (but to empty my crunchenticker at him and slap another mag in and fire that one, too) but to defend myself with lethal force!”
“Chief, that bugger still wouldn’t go down; we had to put him away finally with the tank. Tell the SWAT guys to step it up next time, willya?”
My shotokan is by now fossilized rather than just rusty, but I suspect it still works. Not to mention the Fairbairn Quick Kill. I just wish I’d had an opportunity to study Krav Maga. Not the crap they teach to civilians, but the real deal.
The first ain’t gonna happen.
Probably not. The “teens” would likely scatter at the first sign of resistance, but there’s always the chance they’d gang up on you. It could happen ….
As Stalin (?) said “Quantity has a quality all its own.”
BTW, sorry about the “older”! 🙂
Looked like Haystack Calhoun…
lol!!! I used to watch him on the TeeVee!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haystacks_Calhoun
“BTW, sorry about the “older”!”
No apologies necessary; our host, Dr. Bob, is way older than me.
“I used to watch him on the TeeVee!”
I’m probably an inch taller and 325 pounds lighter and don’t see early-onset terminal diabetes in my few-chuh. My family’s stats indicate cancer, senility and/or gunshot.
Guys that get that huge, like dogs, tend not to live very long. One of my former cop partners from thirty years ago did some part-time pro wrestling; he was 6’6″ and 410. When the two of us walked into a place, all the chit ceased immediately. He was nervous about me, though, when we did the baton training stuff at the police academy: “I don’t trust you, Dave!”
What’s tee-vee like nowadays anyway? Haven’t seen any in a long time; I remember it was getting worse and worse, with longer and louder and more frequent commercials, and totally insipid, stupid programming and shows. Everything is a friggin’ soap opera now, apparently, even biker gangs.
My favorite pro wrestler was this guy:
http://www.rowdyroddypiper.com/
What’s tee-vee like nowadays anyway?
I torrent 99% of what I watch. People cut out all the commercials and upload it. I have a semi-automated system on a Mac Mini that feeds my Apple TV box. I keep cable TV for the females to prevent rioting.
Ditto on the tee-vee and movie torrent thang. Not much time to watch anything lately, though, so I wondered. We have a Mac Mini at work running FileMaker Pro; yet another platform for me to support, but the Powers wanna dump it ASAP and go to some other deal. Whatever.
At least two of my brothers also keep the cable for that same express reason: to keep the fems from rioting. One of my brothers was gonna cut it and they raised Holy Hell.
We also have a decent collection of DVDs and VHS tapes here, gathered over the years.
And I see from my WSJ nooz squirt that the Home Depot chain got whacked with the same hacker package that Target did. Nice goin’ you pogie-bait capons! You saw the Target thing and you did what, exactly, with your own infrastructure???
Mrs. OFD called a little while ago; she doesn’t get why so many hordes of peeps care to live in southern Kalifornia; traffic, noise, crowding, mayhem, etc. And she may have to do a gig there in LA near the end of October. I couldn’t stand it. Downtown here is like the big city to me. Population: about 8k. I bitch about the traffic here. Daily.
Did I read something here a few weeks ago that Hillary isn’t in good health? I mentioned that elsewhere and people are asking for details.
@OFD: Those wouldn’t be HP printers, would they? For decades, we’ve used nothing else, but… The hardware is great, but HP software sucks, and always has. With the two printers we now have, we’ve had enough. The drivers are just too unreliable: the PCs lose contact with the printers, print jobs come out in the wrong order. Problem after problem, we’re switching brands just to get away from the stupid drivers.
We’re now looking for replacements. I have a Kyocera and a Samsung on my short list. There’s a salesman from Sharp that keeps calling, but I can’t find any online reviews of Sharp products. Any suggestions from y’all for a reliable “just work” brand?
@Michael Polak
That looks like it’d work, but all I really needed was a deep socket with maybe an extension. I’m not even sure if the nut is standard or metric.
___________________________________________________________
The plumber you called will almost certainly use a basin wrench and not a socket. The basin wrench is the tool made for what you’re trying to do.
Okay, why does Brad’s name come out normal most of the time, but sometimes as a link to his surname and email address?
I expect it’s a matter of being logged in to WordPress – I rarely bother, since commenting works fine without.
Not that. I try to be always logged into WordPress (as I was then and am now) because it’s necessary in order to be able to edit posts.
“@OFD: Those wouldn’t be HP printers, would they?”
It’s a Dell. They standardized on Dell computers and printers a while back, I guess. I’m pretty sure I just gotta reinstall the bugger. While I was in there I noticed the GM’s computer has a ton of stuff on it, including a dozen other printers, countless files, apps, and directories, etc, and she doesn’t have much space left on her C drive. So that’ll be the next issue, no doubt. I’m betting the production manager who shares the office with her has tons of free space on his, just a wild guess.
GM’s computer has a ton of stuff on it
Had a situation here at work about four years back. Had to use the second in command’s system to install some new software. He was away from his desk. I logged in and saw pictures of naked women on the screen, and it wasn’t his wife. Didn’t bother me but there are females in the office and I was concerned about possible legal problems. I did show someone else so that it was not just my word against the offender.
I did not know how to handle the situation so I consulted a friend I trusted. He said since there is nothing specific in the policy against such that I should just ignore it. That is what I did.
In retrospect I should have alerted the boss. Maybe the offender would have been terminated which in my opinion would have been a good thing. Most certainly the offender would have been royally pissed at me and used every chance he got to discredit me and make my life miserable. He was already a big enough jerk.
“Probable headlines:” More like:
“Teens Injured in Mall Attack” What is being investigated as a racially motivated hate crime occurred when a large white male defended himself against an attack by young, black victims of poverty. Charges are pending against the white male for failure to use restraint and allow the black males to vent their frustration with their place in society. Film at 11.
We’re now looking for replacements.
We have a workgroup printer, scanner and fax. Made by Konica/Minolta. Full color. A little pricey to purchase but after that we only pay $50 a month for maintenance which includes consumables. They have smaller models. The drivers have been rock solid.
The biggest problem we have is that people will change the paper in the trays. We have three trays with two trays with plain paper and one with letterhead. Some clod will put letterhead in one of the plain paper trays and before they can print someone else’s job will print. Rather than just select Letterhead in the printer dialog and let the printer handle the tray assignment they choose the stupid method.
They also reload the paper and change the tray dividers and the orientation of the paper. The printer handles it OK but it annoying to find paper coming out in a different orientation. The people that use it are basically idiots that refuse to learn new technology.
Medal of Honor convention in town starting today. The place is only a couple of blocks from where I work. I will probably go there and stand in awe of being able to meet a true hero. Something I would never do for any current movie or music star. I was driving through Kingston one time and got behind a vehicle that Medal of Honor plates. Sent chills up my spine.
“Probable headlines:” More like:
“Teens Injured in Mall Attack” What is being investigated as a racially motivated hate crime occurred when a large white male defended himself against an attack by young, black victims of poverty. Charges are pending against the white male for failure to use restraint and allow the black males to vent their frustration with their place in society. Film at 11.
That’s the effect I was groping towards. Even when defending himself the white guy is always guilty in the eyes of the media.
Truth. I had an HP Scanner plugged into my iMac a couple of years ago and every time I grabbed the top of the iMac screen to adjust its tilt it would be hot as hell. Once I finally motivated myself to troubleshoot the issue I learned there was a bug in the HP scanner software for Mac OS X that if the scanner was plugged into USB and powered on it would peg the CPU at 100%. No fix ever issued (at the time). So, I uninstalled the HP crapware and unplugged the scanner. I was rarely scanning anything anyway. Now I have an all-in-one Canon that works well for me.
I was under the impression that Dell printers were just HP printers with a Dell case on them?
We got an order overnight from Canada, which is the first international order we’ve gotten since at least the first of August. That’s a bit odd. In that period I’d have expected to ship at least ten kits internationally, probably eight of which would have gone to Canada.
I got curious so I looked up your web site’s page on Shipping where it says:
No international shipments.
Perhaps that is a contributing factor?