Clear and comfortable today. I hope. Yesterday was overcast and some parts of Houston and surrounds got hammered with rain. I never saw more than a drizzle.
Picked up a third of the pipes I went north for yesterday. What looked like ordinary light weight fence posts turned out to be crazy heavy, schedule 80 galvanized pipe. I only got six 10ft pipes on the truck and it was already caving in the roof. I’ll either get a trailer for the rest, including the 20ft pipes, or have them deliver to the BOL. I did not know delivery was an option. It might not be if the cost is more than renting a trailer and buying the gas. The pipe is so heavy I might save it for the dock repairs and use pipe instead of pilings.
Today I’ve got two pickups on the way to the BOL to meet with the second opinion septic engineer. Haven’t heard back from the first guy yet about schedule, or cost. He’s got a reputation for good work but also for being hard to pin down. Considering we’ll be living with the system for a long time, it makes sense to have another opinion.
So I will not be commenting or riding herd for most of the day. I’ll likely spend the night up there, and drive home on Friday to get ready for Easter. There I go, making plans. Hope that doesn’t bite my backside later.
I’ve got a bunch of stuff to take up with me of course, and work to do while I’m there. No rest for the wicked I’m afraid.
Stacking for two now, turning money into stuff. It’s one strategy for dealing with high inflation. Stack it up, while it’s still cheap.
nick
59F with 67%RH this morning. National forecast shows high pressure keeping the whole middle of the country clear today, and partly clear tomorrow. It’s much nicer to drive in the clear…
n
LOL:
Two Inmates in All-Female Prison in New Jersey Are Pregnant After 27 Trannies Moved in With Real Women
But, but, but, a trans-woman is a real woman and couldn’t get a woman pregnant. ProgLibTurds are ruining the entire World.
Where have you been? Disney is in the fetish property business and has been for a long time.
Pipes on the roof, and not in the box? And only 10′ long? Nick, you need a truck!
“But, but, but, a trans-woman is a real woman and couldn’t get a woman pregnant. ProgLibTurds are ruining the entire World.”
Two steps:
Re; loosing large/long comments – suggest you compose those off-line in your word processor. The 500 errors still happen very randomly, and sometimes your browser will lose the content with the ‘back’ button.
Losing ‘back button content’ seems to happen more with browsers in ‘private’ mode, or with some ad-blockers and their settings. Might happen more often on phones/tablets.
It’s random enough that a quick CopyAll/SaveToClipboard is a good practice before hitting the Submit button.
I don’t think it’s a theme problem; 500 errors are from the server before it hands off the request to WordPress code. It happens so random, it’s hard to diagnose or track.
Yes, Rick, I do prepare posts on LibreOffice or MS Word sometimes and then cut & paste them into this box (Add Your Comment).
I’m so tired of hiring attorneys. Especially remote ones. In the last 2 years, I’ve dealt with lawyers in Texas, Washington, Illinois, and now California.
I’m dealing with real estate in Illinois, owned partly by my late sister in California, from Houston. My Illinois attorney tells me we need legal help in California, probably probate. It appears my Brother-in-Law hasn’t opened probate.
FML.
Here in UK, we’re facing local government elections next month. Or some of us are…
In London, it’s Council elections. Nothing higher up the ladder. These guys (and gals) are responsible for such things as household refuse collection, and other, similarly unglamourous tasks.
I only mention this because it illustrates the difference between US and UK practice. In UK, you only get a postal vote, if (as I have) you ask for it. Such request stands until you rescind it. Some weeks before Election Day, you are sent a ballot paper (or papers if more than one race is to be contested. We do not have omnibus ballots – it’s one ballot paper per race). For this election, for me, there’s just the one – choose any 3 names, by marking a cross against each. In the mailing, there was the aforementioned ballot paper, and 2 envelopes, one to hold the filled-out ballot, with a tear-off sheet which requires your name and DOB. The other is an outer mailing envelope, with pre-paid postage – First Class.
You cast your vote, place the completed voting paper in the first envelope, seal it, and affix your signature and DOB. The whole then goes into the outer, postage-paid, envelope, and the sealed result goes into the mailbox. There are no separate collection boxes. In the alternative, you can hand your ballot envelope in at a collection point. I didn’t – I trust Royal Mail to deliver my vote.
On Election Day, the signatures and DOB are verified against the list of authorised postal voters, the signature sheets are detached, and the still sealed vote envelopes are passed to the counters. Counting is manual, we do not use mark-sense or other technology. Eventually, the tallies are sent to the Returning Officer, who then stands up and announces the results. Ballots are retained against the possibility of dispute – as it might be: a demand for a recount in the case of a close result. And then for a further period – how long, I don’t know.
G.
It’s nice weather today. Not a cloud in the sky. About 80F or 299K. I was sitting on the side porch with the dogs and a few cats snoozing and just surveying my domain like I’m Fred G. Sanford.
We have some flowers similar to dandelions. Yellow flower that changes to a puff. I saw a hummingbird peck at a puff. Ok, they eat something other than sugar water. She came back a few minutes later and she’s not eating. She’s building a nest. Pretty cool.
“Rystad: Permian drilling permits hit all-time monthly high in March”
https://www.ogj.com/drilling-production/drilling-operations/article/14274890/rystad-permian-drilling-permits-hit-alltime-monthly-high-in-march
“Horizontal drilling permits for new wells in the Permian basin hit an all-time high in March, with 904 total permit awards, driven by elevated oil prices and production demand, Rystad Energy research shows.”
Well, the well drillers have decided to start drilling extra wells. But getting their crude oil and natural gas to market will be tough as the existing pipelines are almost full.
Lynn, your friend might try Dragon NaturallySpeaking or equivalent. In addition to transcribing speech it allows one to open applications, perform menu operations, and IIRC say “click” to execute a mouse click.
Using it would require that she have a few hundred dollars to buy it (possibly less on sale or if they have a handicap discount), a beefy enough Windows PC to run it (i7 with 8GB RAM is fine), and the ability to speak clearly and consistently. (And, most likely, someone to set it up for her. It’s not difficult … for a gearhead with decades of messing with computers. I don’t assume that most people can install and configure anything.)
She might also look for alternative pointing devices, or maybe a stand-alone touchpad which she can use with both hands, one to “point” and one to click.
Well crap, my 79 year old friend is losing her ability to talk understandably so Dragon and those other products are out. She told us that the ALS was coming on strong since the first of the year and she was beginning to wonder if she would make it to her 80th in June. Her husband has to lift her in and out of bed since her legs do not work at all anymore and she is having trouble breathing also.
For those of us (me) who don’t know where the “Permian Basin” is –
“The Permian Basin is a large sedimentary basin in the southwestern part of the United States. The basin contains the Mid-Continent Oil Field province. This sedimentary basin is located in western Texas and southeastern New Mexico.”
And maybe more than you want to know (except @Lynn) … https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian_Basin_(North_America) .
For those of us (me) who don’t know where the “Permian Basin” is –
“The Permian Basin is a large sedimentary basin in the southwestern part of the United States. The basin contains the Mid-Continent Oil Field province. This sedimentary basin is located in western Texas and southeastern New Mexico.”
And maybe more than you want to know (except @Lynn) … https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian_Basin_(North_America) .
Permian Basin is producing about half of the crude oil in the USA now, between five and six million barrels of crude oil per DAY. Before horizontal drilling started in the 1990s and fracking started in the early 2000s, Permian Basin had drifted down to about a half million barrels of oil per day.
A barrel is 42 US gallons of something.
About a half million barrels per day of Permian Basin crude oil heads to Italy from Point Comfort, Texas. They are using lightering (smaller ships load at shore facilities and transfer to larger Panamax ships anchored in deep water, 200 feet deep or so). So about two Panamax ships a week. The owner wants to get this up to a million barrels per day so he is building a deep water port (dredging 40 foot to 65 foot deep) at Point Comfort.
The rest of the Permian Basin crude oil heads to the refineries in Big Spring, Texas and along the Gulf Coast. It is problematic since those refineries are built for heavy, sour (sulfur) crude oil and the Permina crude oil is light and sweet.
A friend’s Dad had Lou Gehring’s aka ALS. Hit him hard when he was 93. A few months from “it’s hard to walk” to a hospital bed in his living room. Basically, at the end, he suffocated.
It was interesting and terrible to watch.
BTW, Permian Basin is what we in the oil bidness call a Super Giant crude oil and natural gas reservoir. There are about a dozen and a half Super Giants on Earth. There are five Super Giants in the USA (two in Texas, one in Pennsylvania, one in Alaska, one in Utah / Wyoming), maybe six depending on Gulf of Mexico. There is a Super Giant in Siberia, one in China, one in Netherlands, one in Nigeria, one in Alberta, Canada, one in Iraq, one in Iran, one in Syria, .
There is one Super Super Giant on Earth, Ghawar in Saudi Arabia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghawar_Field
Permian Basin may be turning into a Super Super Giant.
“BREAKING: Elon Musk Wants to Buy Twitter for $43 Billion and Transform It Into ‘Private Company’”
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/04/elon-musk-wants-buy-twitter-43-billion-transformed-private-company/
“Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder Elon Musk made his best and final offer to buy Twitter for $43 billion or $54.20 a share, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday.”
And he will borrow almost every dollar of that amount. He has got credit.
>> But, but, but, a trans-woman is a real woman and couldn’t get a woman pregnant. ProgLibTurds are ruining the entire World.
PA announcement: “Is there a biologist on this plane? If so, please let a flight attendant know.”
At least one member of the supreme court isn’t mentally capable of deciphering that problem.
He will clean house and then IPO. Turning the HQ in San Francisco into a homeless shelter really isn’t a bad idea given the location in the city, but moving the office here wouldn’t change the culture.
Atlanta? I’m sure the CNN Center could use a new tenant. They wouldn’t even have to remove the escalator Sid and Marty Kroft installed.
The upside of the Atlassian tools and GitHub/GitLab is that you know at a glance who is really getting things done in the development organization.
Someone is advising Musk and offering to provide cash if necessary. Maybe his old frenemy Peter Thiel.
Twitter management is now living the classic George Carlin bit, “What A Spot!”
“Russia threatens new nuclear deployments if Sweden, Finland join NATO”
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/14/russia-threatens-new-nuclear-deployments-if-sweden-finland-join-nato.html
“Sweden and Finland are members of the EU, but not NATO, and the latter shares an 830-mile border with Russia.”
The world is changing as Trump so well warned us while he was President. He went over to Germany, gave a speech on the EU needed to protect themselves, and was laughed at. Nobody is laughing now.
Don’t poke the bear.
Hat tip to:
https://www.drudgereport.com/
He will clean house and then IPO. Turning the HQ in San Francisco into a homeless shelter really isn’t a bad idea given the location in the city, but moving the office here wouldn’t change the culture.
The upside of the Atlassian tools and GitHub/GitLab is that you know at a glance who is really getting things done in the development organization.
Someone is advising Musk and offering to provide cash if necessary. Maybe his old frenemy Peter Thiel.
The Saudis. We found out in 2008 that the Saud family has somewhere around $11 trillion in dark money. I suspect that has been doubled since then.
What do you mean “The upside of the Atlassian tools and GitHub/GitLab is that you know at a glance who is really getting things done in the development organization.” ? I do not understand.
Yanno the science demo where the banana gets frozen in LNO2 and then used to hammer a nail into a plank?
Save a Banana–Use a Democrat
or an FBI agent
Twitter management is now living the classic George Carlin bit, “What A Spot!”
Got URL ?
Special Easter service at the church tonight. I dropped by in the morning as the wife had a meeting with the pastor over some issues. The displays in the foyer were not advancing. I said I would fix that issue and I did. In the process I found the computer that communicates to the switcher, and the Streamdeck control module that communicates through that computer to the switcher was no longer functioning. Not good.
I returned this afternoon to resolve the issue. The two guys that replaced me are not at all technical. They can produce videos, know how a switcher works, but when it comes to the details they are clueless. Since I created the system I cannot let my creation have issues. Like a parent sending their child off on wedded bliss.
I moved the network cable from the computer (that is how the laptop communicates with the switcher network) to another port on the network switch. Still did not work. I reset the laptop, still did not work. I put in a temporary cable from the laptop to the network switch and all was working. So the cable is the problem.
I pulled up the false floor and found the network cable had been chewed by rats or mice. Badly damaged. I was able to locate another cable and ran the replacement cable from the network switch to the laptop. All is now good and everything is working.
I doubt the two people that replaced me could have located the problem. As I stated, not at all technical. Plus I know the system and how it is wired almost completely by memory having been involved from day 1 and made several modifications over time.
She knows, but taking the traditional African Amercian community stand with regard to the ‘T’ portion of the LGBTQXYZ spectrum is risking being subject to cancel culture on Twitter.
That is, until Tony cleans house.
I was in Atlanta the morning in 2009 that Morehouse College’s *gay* organization voted to support the administration’s ban on crossdressing, 82-2 IIRC. The quote from one woman I saw interviewed on TV at lunch was, “Civil rights? You can take *off* that dress.”
https://hotair.com/allahpundit/2022/04/14/russia-to-ukraine-you-sank-our-battleship-n462485
Dr. Pournelle called it – see the “Pournelle’s Law” entry : https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/pournelles-law/ :
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/12/sec-elon-musk-twitter-00024667
Really not a problem, since they already lost all credibility by ignoring the rampant insider trading in Congress.
By using American DIE ensigns and JGs to do your navigating?
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/12/sec-elon-musk-twitter-00024667
Really not a problem, since they already lost all credibility by ignoring the rampant insider trading in Congress.
And Musk is no longer the number one shareholder in Twitter, Vanguard now owns more than 10%.
“GOA Fighting Biden’s Attempt to Expand the Gun Registry”
https://www.gunowners.org/new-rule-to-expand-atf-gun-registry/
“The new rule will be entitled “Definition of ‘Frame or Receiver’ and Identification of Firearms,” but it will do far more than the White House is pretending.”
“GOA will analyze the differences between this final rule and the previously published proposed rule, but here is what we know already. The proposed rule from last year would:
Somewhere in that new rule by the ATF is microstamping of the firing pin to stamp the gun serial number on a cartridge breech.
True. But I doubt DR. Pournelle was plagued by mice and/or rats. The damage was obvious when I pulled the false floor. The steps I took was merely isolating the issue to the laptop, network switch, or the cable.
The entire out sheath of the cable for about 9 inches was gone. The exposed twisted pair had several places where the vermin had chewed through to expose bare copper. Finally, two of the copper wires had separated. The final one was one of the wires used for ethernet.
I haven’t had rat damaged cables, but I did have a fiber cable chewed by a squirrel at a previous job. It must have been good, as he didn’t stop at a nibble, the sucker went through the outer sheath and all 12 strands.
@lynn
ALS is a hard disease. My friend from whom I got our Cardigans was killed by ALS within a few months.
All of the medical assistive devices were taking too long. We cobbled together devices for her to help with speech. An android tablet loaded with software to speak for her, pre-loaded with her common phrases. There are a lot of apps out there that help. I also picked up a Tobii eye tracker, and configured it so she could use her eyes on her computer monitor instead of mouse that didn’t work very well in her case as she weakened so quickly.
Your friend would benefit from your tech know how. I wish we had inserted ourselves into her medical appointments. Her husband was to grief struck snd old himself to be a good advocate. I think she could have lived longer. Although with his ALS hit her, the rapid progression may have been a blessing of sorts
I am so sorry, though. It’s a hard one.
Your friend would benefit from your tech know how. I wish we had inserted ourselves into her medical appointments. Her husband was to grief struck snd old himself to be a good advocate. I think she could have lived longer. Although with his ALS hit her, the rapid progression may have been a blessing of sorts
Her husband is much more of a techie than me. He is only 72 and retired so he spends most of the day taking care of her, carrying her from the bed to the restroom and then to her chair with the hospital table. I did not know about her speech being slurred, that was a new one. ALS is a cruel disease. And yes, rapid progression may be a blessing.
I know her through a science fiction book group. She wrote a couple of books that Baen published and edited Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy magazine. She can still type though. Her worst problem is clicking the buttons on her trackball right now as she has to use her left hand to do so and moving her left arm across the keyboard is tiring. One does not think about these things until one is afflicted by them.
@Geoff, that voting method sounds sensible.
@drwilliams, I’m pretty sure Congress exempted themselves from insider trading laws long ago, so SEC isn’t ignoring them, SEC doesn’t have jurisdiction.
N
Met with the septic guy. Gonna be some challenges.. interesting guy, from Kenya. Used a professional store bought dowsing rod to explore the property. Found stuff too. Including what might be an un-permitted septic system for a travel trailer. That will need more exploration.
Decided to till the garden plot. Tiller started right up, and I have a 20 x 30 garden area with all soft fluffy clay dirt now. I have to figure out what to plant, and where. I tried to till another area but it had landscape fabric under it. It will make a great raised bed when I get the dirt sorted.
Think I might go sit on the dock with a ginger ale and maybe a fire. Listen to some shortwave…
N
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/04/tweet-of-the-day-schadenfreude-edition.php
Here’s hoping the House of Saud has billions invested in CNN.
@Nick
“Think I might go sit on the dock with a ginger ale and maybe a fire. Listen to some shortwave…”
Or just listen to the music of the evening.
Soy based wire casings are the problem. “Green” technology.
If you have a chronic problem, Honda sells a tape with embedded capcacin (sp?) to wrap around the wires where the rats chew repeatedly.
Of course, there are the usual sprays and bait traps, but wouldn’t it be simpler for the manufacturers to be a little less “green”?
Several attempts at case action lawsuits have been tried against Honda and Toyota. Kia also has a problem.
@drwilliams,itt ended up being the music of the celestial spheres. Almost full moon too.
N
Finally got my logitech BT keyboard to pair with this phone. It’s in my bag, and I remembered it this time. Makes it a lot more convenient to type.
Fire and moon were nice. Neighbor stopped by to chat for a bit. He’d been out with the other neighbors on their nightly pontoon boat cruise around the lake, drinking and BSing. He had lots of good advice as he’s further along with his home remodelling project.
So far everyone has been helpful and nice.
n
Going to bed early. Turns out that tilling a 20x30ft patch of clay is exhausting. Who knew?
n
>> I’m dealing with real estate in Illinois, owned partly by my late sister in California, from Houston. My Illinois attorney tells me we need legal help in California, probably probate. It appears my Brother-in-Law hasn’t opened probate.
Save your heirs the same headaches, put all your property in a trust.
My friend is going through that currently with his father. The poor man went from a healthy, fit newly-retired status to wheelchair-bound and almost incapacitated in about two years. He has made arrangements for euthanasia to take place a time of his choosing and informed friends and family of them.