Cool and dry? Or cold and damp… yesterday was nice. Dry and just slightly too cool.
Didn’t get anything of substance done yesterday. Slept late, watched and bid on auction lots for the lake house, and avoided my TODO list.
I’m taking today as it comes, not making any predictions about what work I won’t actually do, and maybe some will get done. Because the world has turned into opposite land, maybe that will let me be productive.
Reading posts from March of 2019, and a bunch was going on. Interesting to look back. Also something to do instead of going to bed.
Do as I say, not as I do, and get some stuff done off your list. Time is short, it ALWAYS is. Stack stuff.
n
It is 35 F and white outside at 7 am here in the wilds of Fort Bend County. All of the roofs are covered with a heavy frost. The cat went outside for 10 minutes. The dog went outside for 1 minute and then raced for the back door, she is a fair weather girl.
I bought about ten #10 cans of the Mountain freeze dried food last week. Their price is still in the $30 to $50 range. I may buy another ten cans this week. Each can is 10 to 20 servings. Kinda expensive. And I am running out of places to hide them.
Both sides wanted a Covid-type event for a long time, but I don't think it has played out exaclty the way either extreme wanted.
What amazes me is how many people still believe in the concept of the "affordable" Tonymobile with Toyota RAV4s rolling off dealer lots for $90,000.
My wife was amazed at the Nintendo display at Target yesterday when she took my daughter for a forced booster to participate in a school trip to New York City.
I asked, "How many consoles did they have in stock to sell?"
"What do you mean?"
"Standard bare bones grey Switch Lite. How many were in the store to buy right then?"
"…"
"Check the availability online."
"… They don't have any consoles. Just the games."
"Exactly."
The chicomms and rooskies will start selling Mr. Lynn’s cracked software for $60 a pop.
37°F, clear, blue in San Antonio.
Bill Gates certainly didn't forsee the puncturing of "The Legend of BillG, Boy Genius" even though nothing revealed to date has been a surprise to anyone involved with tech for 30+ years.
Forget landmark intellectual achievement with his needle fetish. He'll be lucky if the masses don't show up at the Giant House to drag him out by his hair and set him on fire one morning.
The downside of telling everyone exactly where you live for a couple of decades.
“He'll be lucky if the masses don't show up at the Giant House to drag him out by his hair and set him on fire one morning.”
What do you call a pale sweaty billionaire burning on his front lawn?
1) A candle lit in the darkness
2) A mostly peaceful protest
3) A new holiday founded
4) A good start
5) All of the above
Prices on discretionary goods and services can't be jacked up at the same rate as mandatory items when price inflation is biting. People will bitch about the price of potatoes but they'll pay because they have to eat. If they can do without something, or can convince themselves that they can do without it, they'll forego buying a discretionary item.
The trick for Lynn would be to convince the customers that, even at a 30% greater price, his software will save them even more. This would be complicated by the availability of cracked versions at a "steep" discount.
(On that last point, I believe that a few years ago I suggested that Lynn should "allow" a special version of WinSim to be "leaked", where "special" means "giving wrong answers".)
A child molester getting what he deserves?
I don't agree that a seventeen-year-old girl is a child in the sense that child protection laws were meant to protect. However, I'm willing to jump on the bandwagon and call for the lynching of Bill Gates, Tom Hanks, Bill Clinton, and any other leftard who can be tarred with that brush.
Anyone hopping the Lolita Express to Pedo Island was not the victim of biology, with a doe-eyed waif catching their attention behind the counter at Burger Doodle and resulting in a situation where they couldn't control themselves.
Likewise, the doe-eyed waifs hitching a ride on a private jet were far from innocent IMHO.
Tom Hanks? Really?
When people ask me about my favorite Hanks movie, I always cite "Bachelor Party". It strikes me as the one where he was simply "Tom Hanks, Actor" and not "Tom Hanks, Oscar Winning Movie Star", the latter starting really early in his career, long before he was even nominated.
It's real, a friend in the Bay area that was shopping for a car (theirs got totalled) shared the picture of the sticker on FB.
Around here, $70,000 for a TRD 4Runner with a Made in Japan sticker and the extra row of seats is not unheard of, but a $90,000 RAV4 is still a RAV4 even if it goes 0 to 60 in 5 seconds.
If it wasn’t “Show Ya”, someone was probably buying the RAV4 to put on blocks somewhere. One of the Chinese relations in the Bay Area did that with the rereleased Z car about 20 years ago, but he had to give up on the fantasy of a tenbagger when it turned out that the embedded computers are far more fragile than anyone anticipated. The cars would essentially self destruct sitting in storage, and replacement components wouldn't be easy to find beyond a decade time frame.
Googling their address shows the car is now a daily driver … as intended by the designers. The same applies to the RAV4 even without a hybrid battery pack.
I doubt any modern car could be put on blocks like an 80s Grand National. Of course, even those aren’t without issues rolling out of storage. The urban legend is that a GNX (only 547 made) went to the junkyard during Cash For Clunkers 1.0.
Newly vertical but still unfed and un-caffeinated. 66F with sun and only 45%RH.
n
I doubt any modern car could be put on blocks like an 80s Grand National.
— when I was in grad school I met another (older)student there who's husband had died. She had Thanksgiving dinner for all the strays, and I stuck my head in the garage and that is EXACTLY what she had on blocks.
And once in Scotsdale, I was on my bike (ninja 600r) at a stop light and I witnessed a Grand National SMOKE another bike at the light. A bit of revving, and the biker casually took off, but the driver hammered it. Biker was VERY surprised to be left behind. He eventually caught up and passed, but he clearly didn't know what a Grand National was.
good times.
n
That car was instantly regarded as collectible, even the non GNX versions. Faster than a Corvette of the era with the same engine block but without the limitation of the aluminum engine heads. The preservation had to be carefully done, however.
The 80s vehicle which is now desirable that not many people expected is the Fox body Mustang.
Cash For Clunkers 1.0 took a lot of 80s and 90s cars off the road which could still be rolling around today if they were maintained. 2.0 will go after beater trucks, replacing 20+ year old Tacomas, Rangers, and Frontiers. Tony is late with the Jesus truck, however.
Brad: News you can use.
This raises questions of exactly why women are able to retire at a younger age despite living several years longer than men and generally contributing much less to the retirement fund via taxes, but I'll probably be screeched at that I'm not allowed to ask those questions because I'm not a woman. (Not until the paper work goes through, at any rate.)
>> Around here, $70,000 for a TRD 4Runner with a Made in Japan sticker and the extra row of seats is not unheard of, but a $90,000 RAV4 is still a RAV4 even if it goes 0 to 60 in 5 seconds.
I had a 2007 RAV4 with the optional V6. 269 hp and 246 ft/lb torque. 0 to 60 was 6.4 seconds. That car was really fun to drive. Was disappointed when Toyota dropped the V6 option, got my first Subaru (Forester) after my wife took the RAV4. And the RAV was the last car I've bought as new.
>> Tony is late with the Jesus truck, however.
Every time I see a picture of that truck I just can't imagine what the buyer profile is for it, other than no ADM for an EV pickup.
https://insideevs.com/news/564011/tesla-cybertruck-prototype-spotted-supercharging/
A book finder web site that might be of interest to us nerds here:
From recommendo@cool-tools.org
Toy for rich people.
The Jesus truck will not be delivered for $40k. That's a price Tony and, subsequently, Ford seized upon as making the masses believe enough to plunk down $100 deposits since a lot of truck deals got done for that number pre-pandemic for $500/month with some … okay, a *lot* … of creativity in the F&I room.
Howard Hessman – the hippie DJ "Johnny Fever" on "WKRP in Cincinnati" and the actor-turned-history teacher Charlie Moore on “Head of the Class,” died Saturday at age 81.
The "WKRP" show can be found it several places online. Funny show, especially if you grew up them 'olden times'.
RIP Don Sturdy, Hesseman's pseudonym as one of the actual pioneer DJs in the AOR radio format.
The "WKRP" DVD box set has 90% of the music licensing correct if you are a fan. Most important is "Queen of the Forest" as the first rock song Johnny Fever plays on the station/series.
Hesseman's finest moment of the series IMHO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTPzTG1Lx60
Who knew he could do the physical comedy.
“I’ll play anything. I’ll play The Carpenters. I’ll play Barry Manilow”
Doubly funny because I was a "Phone Cop" for a decade.
Hey, I was going thru some old posts and comments because I am awake at 2 am so why not??
And Lynn made that prediction BEFORE covid stirred everything around.
n
Nah, I screwed up. I figured that Trump was a shoe-in in the 2020 election. I did not understand how many people hated his tweets and voted against him. So, AOC will not be President in 2024. It will probably be a Republican in 2024 due to the hubris of Biden but I am not sure yet. Now in 2028, we still may get AOC or her ilk.
I also underestimated the magnitude of the federal debt growth, since I did not predict The Koof. We are already hitting $30 trillion in federal debt here in 2022, not 2024.
https://www.usdebtclock.org/
BTW, go watch the scene again and imagine David Letterman as Andy.
Hugh Wilson had complete freedom with casting *except* Gary Sandy as Andy. Wilson wanted Letterman, but CBS/MTM wanted Sandy, envisioning the series as a gender swapped "Mary Tyler Moore Show" with Andy as the "normal" main character surrounded by crazies.
Speaking of a funhouse mirror reality, just got done watching The Matrix with D1 and wife…
And it still rocks. The effects still look great, even bullet time and the wire work.
And the Lobby Shootout scene still rocks the world.
n
I always thought that the Lobby Shootout scene was both amazing and totally over the top.
Details. AOC is still around and doesn't look to be going away. The debt is there. NO ONE had 'global pandemic' for 2020.
n
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10456177/Incredible-video-shows-Nantucket-UNDERWATER-winter-storm-barrels-New-England.html
that's something you don't see every day.
n
What happened to font sizes?
>> I was just hoping for 15% inflation a year for this year and the next three years, not 30% per year this year and the next three years. My business plan cannot handle 75% inflation over the four years, much less 186% inflation over the four years.
What, you're not jacking up your software prices accordingly?
I wish. I would double my prices today if I could. You would not believe the push back that we are getting on our prices today that we have not raised since 2011.
I have eleven competitors. One of them is freeware and supposedly not bad software. Several of the others will meet my pricing any day of the week. One of my competitors, rhymes with funnywell and is a bear's favorite food, was leasing their software in 2019 for half my price, 20% of their normal pricing. Very predatory if you ask me. They stole several of my customers which I am still furious about.
I asked my 83 year old father the other night what he thought about living through two pandemics. He said three pandemics: Polio, Asian Flu, and now The Koof.
He said it was just life.
Still there, at least on my screen. Using the +/- buttons sets a local cookie, so there's that.
It may be that one of my plugin updates cleared the cookie, but doubt it, since the plugins don't look at the cookies. (The font size is there via the theme.)
Perhaps the font cookie expired on your system. That particular cookie expires every 30 days.
No kidding. The voters named Dominion Voting Machine went overwhelmingly against him.
re font on this site, they shrank on my desktop (Dissenter, which is a fork of Brave) from one visit to the next.
When I worked for the Egghead Discount Ponzi in the 80s, the Clearwater facility of the "funnywell" company got caught making and distributing mass quantites of pirate Lotus 1-2-3 diskettes, going as far as buying the infamous Copy II PC Option board and requisite equipment to duplicate the laser burn spots on the physical medium, the key to fooling the copy protection.
Auditors eventually caught on, supposedly due to the second rate labels the company had printed for the disks.
I thought I was imagining the smaller fonts…
n
and it's something besides the +/- buttons, because they zoom the whole page, or act the same as ctrl scroll anyway. If I make it any bigger, I loose the calendar and recent comments to the bottom of the page.
Text in the comment editor is nice and big, but the site text def seems smaller.
n
Re: font sizes…..
Oops…my bad.
One of the plugins I updated today had overridden the font size for the 'p' (paragraph) tag.
Fixed. Base font size is now set to your preference as stored by the cookie.
I blame the 'bomb cyclone'. Or something (anything) else.
Four. Swine Flu in the 70s.
Maximus Griftimus:
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle put pressure on Spotify to drop Joe Rogan: Couple who signed £18m deal with streaming giant 'express concerns' over Covid misinformation as cancel mob try to remove vaccine-sceptic podcaster
Royal losers. Spotify wasted their money on this one.
I wonder if they’ll drop *their* contract with Spotify? Nah.
Formerly royal losers and grifters.
Please make a dumb car
I'm hoping that Number Sigh who dropped bye on Wednesday and made several posts come back tomorrow. I will post about plugs and tRump doing the same thing and would like to see its response.
I'm hoping that Number Sigh who dropped bye on Wednesday and made several posts come back tomorrow. I will post about plugs and tRump doing the same thing and would like to see its response.
Excellent pronoun usage and generalization of their forename !
Once a backup camera became a government mandate, the horse was out of the proverbial barn in terms of gadgets which could be added to a vehicle.
Americans love the gadgets, though.
I love me some backup camera. I wouldn't want a vehicle without one.
$6000 … to ride in a box truck. Granted, the Hogwarts Express at Universal Orlando is a gigantic illusion done with pulleys and electric motors, but it isn't a four figure upcharge.
The era of Cheapek continues.
https://blogmickey.com/2022/01/first-look-box-truck-will-transport-guests-between-star-wars-galactic-starcruiser-and-galaxys-edge/
My vote for best WKRP Johnny Fever clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaq7DnKf6cI
And no one was stopping you from buying one.
Once the screen was on the dash, the sky was the limit in terms of what became standard equipment, however.
And a lot of the screens are not a standard size/shape which could be easily swapped like car stereos used to be.
Democrat Incompetence Led To PA Bridge Collapse, So Of Course They Blame Republicans
Photo is captioned as "One of the big "X" beams is rusted through entirely (and yes, I see the cables, so it's probably not a crisis"
https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/01/democrat-incompetence-led-to-pa-bridge-collapse-so-of-course-they-blame-republicans/
I've no doubt that the Dems controling that particular blue shithole are busy working shredders overtime. It's a good thing that none of the 10 people injured died, but at the same time it's too bad that every one didn't die, because the resulting lawsuits would have been fun to watch.
I love me some backup camera. I wouldn't want a vehicle without one.
My 2008 Highlander at the office does not have a backup camera. I miss it very much. I would retrofit one if it was not too much and usable.
I like the backup camera on my 2019 Highlander.
And there are lots of backup camera options that you can install, they just require a small phone-size screen on your dashboard. Some are wireless, and install just above the license plate. Like this one for about $83 : https://www.amazon.com/Wireless-Bluetooth-Support-Installation-LeeKooLuu/dp/B07DVNWNDH?crid=1UAP2BLRZC6T5&keywords=backup+camera+wireless&qid=1643589452&sprefix=backup+camera+wireles%2Caps%2C174&sr=8-3&linkCode=sl1&linkId=d1e3b50d05906341d7b140bd0cac91d7&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl&tag=ttgnet-20
Commonly used on RV's and travel trailers that don't have a backup camera.
The one above requires wiring to your backup lights. But here’s a solar-powered one for about $120: https://amzn.to/3u9f2cB .
Lots of choices.
Lynn, I have an add-on back-up (and front-facing) camera on my van. The display, which also holds the front-facing camera, attaches to the rear-view mirror. It took a little while to get used to the changed appearance and function but it's fine now. The rear camera attaches to the inside of the rear window. Yes, there are cables to the cigarette lighter (AKA accessory power plug) and to the rear camera, but they're plenty long enough to route out of the way. I'd provide a link to the Amazon page if I could find it, but it's buried in our purchase history. (I've mentioned how much my wife shops, right?) IIRC the price was about $150 and I installed it myself.
There are similar models with a wireless connection to the rear camera.
My wife had a backup camera installed by a shop. Camera looking out through a hole drilled near the licence plate and the display as a replacement for the radio and controls in the console. Several thousand dollars, all told.
Most of the aftermarket stereo 'control heads' come with back up cams now too.
I added the Costco one to my old Expy, but almost never used it. The screen looked too valuable sitting on the dash so I put it away, and that meant I rarely got it out. I forget that both my new Expy and wife's Odysey have backup cams. I use the mirrors.
The cam sure makes trailer hookup easy though.
n
Took a break from assembling some flat pack storage furniture so I can clean up the foyer a bit.
Made dinner.
Lamb chops, mashed potatoes, corn, green beans.
Yum. Every speck of meat was eaten. Even the potatoes got eaten (cream, butter, a tablespoon of bacon fat, and a couple tablespoons of bacon crumbles didn't hurt…) And some naan bread to go with it.
Everything came out of the freezer, or a can, except the potatoes. I used real potatoes instead of dried because I had them and they were aging.
I like cooking, and for the most part the family likes what I cook.
If you are living on take out or fast food, home cooking is a great way to save money and prep for hard times.
n
follow-up on funding for repairs of that vital bridge in Pennsylvania:
https://www.westernjournal.com/wake-pa-bridge-collapse-look-4-2-billion-road-repair-fund-found/
@Nick
Four pounds of butter red potatoes, trimmed the rough spots and quartered before going into the pot on the stove. Two pounds of carrots and a sweet onion into the bottom of the instapot. Rubbed spices and browned a 2# pork tenderloin and put it on the rack over the potatoes. Added half a cup of water.
Drained the potatoes, used the hand masher a few times, pared in half a stick of butter, garlic, mashed, added 2% milk, mashed and fluffed.
Sliced the pork tenderloin. Served it with carrots, onions, and potatoes, drizzling all with the broth from the bottom of the pot. Half the bread machine loaf was afternoon "snack".
Divided the rest into plastic containers for lunches and dinners.
Everything on decent sale at the grocery this week, so I didn't have to thaw a pork loin.
Have to watch for another sale on butter. Sam's has been very spotty on jasmine rice for some time, so I will try a mid-week stop there to try to beat the weekend horde and restaurant owners.
Soda on sale this week, so I stocked up for the first time in quite a while. Shelves were practically bare the very next day, but were restocked the day after, with one glaring exception.
No Diet Dr. Pepper at HEB tonight ! And I forgot to look when I went to Kroger after church today. I am down to two weeks in my DDP stash.
Our HEB hasn't had the mini cans of diet DrP in a while. My kids have discovered my small stash and drank it all.
Grrr.
n
"In From The Cold" on Netflix
https://www.netflix.com/title/81123055
A middle 40s American Mom accompanies her ice skating daughter to an ice skating competition in Spain where she is outed by the CIA as a former deep cover Russian secret agent who can change her shape just by getting someone's DNA. Eight episodes.
Mildly Recommended. I am ready for season two.
"Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson Slam Climate Predictions"
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/01/27/joe-rogan-jordan-peterson-slam-climate-predictions/
“Climate Blasphemy! Jordan Peterson, whose podcasts have had over 285 million views, and famous Actor / Comedian Joe Rogan who hosts the wildly popular Joe Rogan Experience, have triggered the entire alarmist community by explaining why they think climate predictions are unreliable.”
“Their broadcast got so much attention, singer Neil Young is boycotting world leading podcast host Spotify for carrying such material.”
So this is what all the fuss is about.
Narrowing the car search down. Not least, we want a local dealer, so we're down to a Skoda Enyaq iV, a VW ID.4, a Volvo XC40 and a Hyundai Ioniq-5. Unlike the US, the dealers here don't have a pile of inventory sitting around. Instead, they have just a few cars at a time, and anything else they have to order in. Likely, there is some central storage that they all share, but I don't really know.
Anyway, I'm sending off inquiries today (it’s Monday here) – see what kind of responses we get.