14:00 – We decided to make a quick run down to Winston yesterday to haul more stuff up here. It was 1:15 down, about 1:30 down there loading, and 1:15 back, for a total of about 4 hours portal-to-portal. Frances and Al met us at the house with their pickup, and we hauled back a full pickup load plus a full Trooper load, including just about all of the remaining science kit chemicals and nearly all of the remaining food. Al and Frances left for home after lunch, and we spent the afternoon moving stuff that needed to be in the heated area there from the garage and vice versa.
We spent most of the morning working downstairs, rearranging furniture in the den. The guest bedroom is now essentially complete. We moved my new desk (a This End Up dining table) to my new office, which is the second downstairs bedroom. I now have my computer, printers, and other gear set up and working in there. There’s still a lot to be done in my office, including installing shelves and moving all my office stuff in. Oh, and I got the propane tank connected to Barbara’s new grill, which she’s going to use to make dinner tonight.
I see the Baltimore cops shot another black guy. The dumb SOB tried to rob an off-duty cop at gunpoint using a realistic-looking toy gun, and got exactly what he deserved, not that that’s likely to stop the UC from rioting. And there was another death by cop incident, this one in WS. The cops sprayed a criminal with pepper spray and he became unresponsive and ended up DOA. The dead guy’s father flew in from Denver, and is trying to stir things up. The only reason that I care is that Frances and Al are still in WS, and we still own a house there. And just yesterday at lunch, I was telling Al that although I didn’t expect mob violence in WS in the near future, he and Frances were welcome at our house here any time.
Wow, it sounds like you picked the perfect time to relocate to rural North Carolina.
My wife’s 87 year aunt just relocated from Baltimore to a assisted living center in Virginia near her daughter. Looks like it was a good time for her to get out.
Well this is fairly odd. Someone jammed a key in our community mailbox and broke it off. Now I cannot get my mail.
Hate those common mailboxes. They are converting houses just 3 blocks away from me to the rural roadside mailboxes. Tiny Town is going to be a farm town of dirt roads by the time I get out of here. I am frequently gone for days at a time, and I have a mail slot in the wall next to the front door, which plops all mail invisibly inside the entry room. I would hate to have mail piling up noticeably outdoors, or jamming a box out on the street. That is going to be a factor when I move. I seldom know more than a day or two in advance when I am going to be away, so it is impossible to notify the post office to hold mail for a few days—they require 10 days advance notice anyway, and from family who lives winters in Florida, USPS here gets that screwed up big time.
There’s no doubt OFD has a good grasp of my situation. If I were to move before the house is sold—as our host has,—I am confident the house would be broken into and damaged. Every vacant house on the street has been broken into, including the house next door, which is now empty. It seems obvious that it is neighborhood thugs who are doing this, because outsiders would not know which house is empty—one cannot really tell when driving down the street. The house next door was breeched just 2 days after it was completely emptied. Sad story there of an older guy who paid 22 years of mortgage on that house, but when his girlfriend died unexpectedly a little over a year ago, he could no longer continue with the mortgage and upkeep solely on his own Social Security. Since he and the girlfriend were not married, he got nothing more when she died. So he declared bankruptcy, which means (around here) the house will go unattended for years, as the banks never take active control of properties they lend to. Probably because the mortgage has been sold so many times that it is not even local anymore.
Meanwhile, Linux Mint is driving me crazy. I have not halted upgrades to Mint itself, because things have become so effed up, that I figured updates might fix some of it. But not only is that NOT happening, it is continuing to dump me further into the abyss. An upgrade of a bunch of things yesterday—NONE from Libre Office—has caused LO to display stuff almost unintelligibly. Even the menu selections are screwed up and essentially unreadable. Stay away from Mint! From my reading of the radio automation forum, this screwy stuff must be affecting Ubuntu, too. Many who upgrade Ubuntu are seeing things break. Of course, the pro’s on that forum say ‘never, ever upgrade a working production machine,’ but I’m only testing by using my own computer for that. Guess I am going to be forced to spend some time moving to CentOS sooner than later. I’ll deal with that after the holidays. Right now, LO is completely unusable. Kerning is so far off that some words have several letters typed over each other, and anything in columns is no longer in columns. AND, of course, I am down to only one computer in the house. Talk about not being prepared…
I did some digging in my mailbox lock and found a very small copper cylinder. Probably one of the lock tumblers I guess. Removed same and the key now works. Still somewhat locking as other keys do not work in the lock. Still, I plan to get a new lock from Home Depot soon and install it (says the man who still has yet to install the sink and cabinet in the new addition bathroom with the wife who is slowly losing her temper).
I am still a big fan of Microsoft Office 2003, the last release before that stupid ribbon menu bar. It Just Works ™. Of course, I am also a big fan of Windows 7 Professional. Just an old fuddy duddy now.
Hey @Chuck_W : we have had good success doing on-line mail stops/starts at the USPS web site. One day is all they need; we have done it the day before leaving, and all was well. We have also adjusted the return date to later than first set up, and that worked well also. Mail delivered in a nice white USPS tray on our doorstep when we returned. You can also opt for pickup at the post office when you return.
Quick process on the web site. Has worked well for us multiple times.
Maybe some pushback finally.
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2015/12/americans-boycott-sams-club-after-ceos-racist-comments-about-white-males/
nick
More paperwork needed for the condo VA purchase. I might expire before they get it all.
Lynn said: “I am still a big fan of Microsoft Office 2003…”
+1
I still prefer it to the later versions and use Outlook 2003 for my hotmail and gmail accounts. MS finally got the connector right about a year ago and it now just works. Unfortunately when it goes out-of-support it may be a bit of a security risk to run things with that version.
@RBT
You used to have in the “Leave a Reply” section a comment with accepted html tags. For guys like me that do not “play” with websites it was very helpful as an indicator of what tags to use to make things easier to read. I would welcome that back.
@lynn @RBT The missing ‘tags’ stuff on comments is enabled (or shown) according to the theme, plus any plugins that affect the comments. There is one comment plugin (the one that allows you to edit your comments), but no options are in there to allow showing the HTML tags (that is a feature in a default WP install, but overridden by that plugin).
Changing to a different theme (responsive, one would hope) might fix that. As enabling my “FormSpammerTrap” plugin (which affects how the comments area looks).
I’d vote for a new responsive theme (like Chaos Manor Reports?) which would add that feature back in, AFAIK. I can do all of that, of course (RBT has given me admin access), but need his approval.
“There’s no doubt OFD has a good grasp of my situation.”
Roger that. From being a small-town cop back in the late 70s and watching local yokel kidz alert each other when their own parents were gonna be away, for obvious B&E and splitting the proceeds reasons, to the current day, when it’s clear that it’s local riff-raff and our own UC scum up here doing them, along with the small-time dope rackets. I recommend at the very least that Mr. Chuck acquire a dog, ANY kinda dog, from the shelter, even, and keep it around from this point on. At the least, it’ll make noise if something is amiss. Additionally, a decent CC firearm that you’re comfortable handling; not sure offhand what the Tiny Town state’s law sez on this but screw it for the time being; as they say, better to be tried by twelve than carried by six. But at least a dog, and the local cops on speed-dial. Furthermore: if you come home and find a door ajar, do NOT enter; stand off and call the cops. They’re paid to check it out. If someone you don’t know or expect is banging on the door, don’t open it, don’t step out, and don’t confront anybody; call the cops.
As for a stable o.s. on the remaining home computer; assuming backups are done and available on another drive, I’d blow away Mint and install CentOS 7 and then load LO on that. I recall that the radio guys were all moving to that, anyway. Might as well all be on the same page; I get a regular CentOS community email with loads of info and have years of RHEL experience, with CentOS and Scientific Linux being nearly verbatim clones.
“More paperwork needed for the condo VA purchase. I might expire before they get it all.”
I feel yer pain, hermano. It’s a long slog but eventually it ends.
@Bob, you might like this, “Santa did the perp walk”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bFLKik3vkE&feature=youtu.be
“Movie Reviews,The Man in the High Castle,(2015)” by John Varley
http://varley.net/movie_review/man-in-the-high-castle/
“I found this series incredibly hard to watch. Not because they botched it. No, they did a terrific job of showing what a world where Germany and Japan won WWII in 1947 would look like, after the f***ing Nazis destroyed Washington with an atomic bomb, and have occupied America until the “present day,” which is 1962. Germany controls everything in the East, all the way to the Great Plains. Japan runs the Pacific States. There is a neutral zone in the Rocky Mountains.”
“I am able to watch WWII movies showing Kraut and Jap atrocities because I know that, in the end, the evil was defeated. But seeing what the f***ing Nazis and the f***ing Japs might have done to my beloved country … well, sometimes it made me almost physically ill. But I had to rise above it, because there is much to like in this ten-part series. And several things to dislike.”
I have been hearing a lot about this series, I have yet to watch it. Looks interesting.
Official trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzz_6dmv03I
Here’s an interesting article for you to think about. If you click on the link, there’s lots of interesting comments below the article to peruse as well.
~ Sam
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2012/09/do-patent-and-copyright-law-restrict-competition-and-creativity-excessively-posner.html
The Becker-Posner Blog A Blog by Gary Becker & Richard Posner
09/30/2012
Do patent and copyright law restrict competition and creativity excessively?
by Richard Posner
I am concerned that both patent and copyright protection, though particularly the former, may be excessive.
Some new economic studies are also just being released, which show that copyrights and patents, and rents (amazingly) are the actual mechanisms that have been transferring wealth from the middle class to the super-rich.
With my current house and mail situation, I am good for the present, because all mail ends up invisible to passers-by as it is inside the house. Problem with my particular post office, is that it is not self-governing, but is actually a branch of the Muncie post office. All requests for anything presented at the Tiny Town post office, must go to Muncie, and are subsequently propagated back to Tiny Town. This takes several days minimum. I still have family here who tries to make it work when they go on increasingly frequent 3 to 5 day trips, but when they get back, their mailbox (one of the rural ones at the street, even though they are within the city limits) is packed to overflowing. My optimum would be to relocate to someplace where the mail is still delivered to the house, and I can install another mail slot that deposits everything inside the house, instead of somewhere outside.
I am never going back to Microsoft. *nix is just too capable to have to return to the crippled terminal capacities Windows has. Strangely, EVERY Windows programmer I am acquainted with (about 5) all use Linux to program for Windows. Weird but true.
Yeah, programmers, developers and engineers with whom I have been acquainted pretty much all use either Linux or Apple operating systems to do their work.
“But seeing what the f***ing Nazis and the f***ing Japs might have done to my beloved country … well, sometimes it made me almost physically ill.”
Is Mr. Varley aware of what the socialists/commies have done in REAL LIFE to his beloved country? Pretty much without firing a shot? He’s a good example of it, with his single-minded and public-skool-induced myopic focus on the evil Nazis and Japs. Maybe someday some screenwriter and director and producers will have the ballz to do a movie that shows how it would have been here if the Soviets and Chicoms had won and taken over our beloved country. But I won’t hold my breath.
WRSA links to this:
https://info.publicintelligence.net/DHS-FBI-NCTC-ParisAttacks.pdf
Which in turn has links to some good stuff from DHS.
Did you know we had an Office of Bombing Prevention?
nick
A nice Black lady with a toddler in the back seat of her car decided to plow down a bunch of people on the Vegas Strip. One dead, multiple critical, many injured. I can’t wait to see what drugs were involved, was she on welfare, and most of all, how the MSM will hide the fact she’s Black. WHITEY! would have been the lede if she was a Caucazoid.
without comment
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-12-21/germans-scramble-buy-weapons-amid-nationwide-spike-migrant-driven-crime
Tom Kratman’s Caliphate novel playing out before our eyes. NOT a good thing.
nick
I saw that Lost Wages nooz earlier today; just mentioning her alleged race is a rayciss, and I counted at least seven (7) micro-aggressions in your post above. You are just BEGGING for re-education camp!
The nooz from Germany could well be a nice little movie “trailer” for the upcoming main feature here in North Murka at some point. One difference, of course, is that we here already have half a billion to a billion firearms. And LOTS of veterans with training and experience, many of them very pissed off for some odd reason. And LOTS more non-vet civvies who are also increasingly pissed off for various odd reasons, clinging bitterly to their guns and their religion out here in Flyover Country.