White rabbit white rabbit white rabbit.
Warmish and damp. Overcast. Yesterday was much nicer later in the day. It even cleared up, although there was some moisture from the sky in various places, it never really rained and the sky was visible most of the time.
I did some errands in the morning, then helped out a friend in the afternoon. At an auction I picked up a power chair for him to give to his mother. It needs batteries and a little spring but is otherwise shiny and like new. A lot of folks get a scooter and don’t last long enough to wear it out… but it will be a nice quality of life upgrade for his mom. Anyway, got that delivered, then headed north.
I had an estate sale thing based on my non-prepping hobby, and it was more than an hour north. It lasted a couple hours, then I headed home. I did pick up some stuff, but not what I was hoping for based on the pictures. None the less, I’ll have some good stuff for ‘show and tell’ next week.
The guy was a collector, not a hoarder. He had several different, unrelated collections, and he tended to quantity over quality. In a youtube video last night, someone I’ve started watching called himself ‘an accumulator’, not a ‘hoarder’. There is a difference and the new word fits both the guy whose stuff I was going through, and me. I ‘accumulate’. I don’t ‘hoard’.
I think most of us accumulate. It’s a very human thing to accumulate resources. Even homeless people do it. Prisoners do it. The people featured in “Alone” do it. The Jack Reacher character doesn’t do it and it freaks out everyone who notices.
I’m accumulating stuff I hope will help me later, mostly for living but also for recreation and hobby use. I try to make sure the stuff I keep is good stuff, and not just a lot of stuff. I recommend y’all do it too. Stack it up.
nick
(and to back up my contention that there is money laying around everywhere, you just have to recognize it, I picked up an automobile transmission on the side of the road coming home from my buddy’s house, and dropped it off at the scrap yard. Turned it into a quick $14. Not gonna send the girls to college, but pays for a few gallons of gas, and only took a few extra minutes of life.)
I do have a tip for all of the civilans overwhelming the logistics of comic book shows and other pop culture conventions as of late – those are not places where you are going to find “EBay gold” in the form of underpriced merchandise which can be resold for a profit. The dealers pay a lot of money and devote time to be on those vendor floors – it is often their “day jobs” — and anyone doing so is going to know exactly what they are doing setting their numbers in terms of the current market.
More on this point later.
I’m awake and moving. D2 has to leave the house with W1 to get to GS activity in less than 10 minutes. That’s gonna take some doing….
n
Yes, no issues here of which I am aware. I did get an alert on my phone about 05:00 of a tornado warning. The only item of interest to me was the dog started vibrating because of the thunder boomers and the rain. Yes, the dog sleeps on the bed.
It always amuses me to see people who think that humans are sooooo consequential. Eh, not so much. Compared to humans, the planet is really, really big. The only thing in human experience which is even on the same order of magnitude is your mom.
(Yes, the entire point of this comment was to make a your mom joke. I regret nothing.)
The interesting question here is who would serve the warrant at Mar-A-Lago if Trump doesn’t fly to New York and cooperate.
FBI is out unless we are now at “banana republic” status.
FDLE and Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Deputies ultimately report to DeSantis.
City of Palm Beach PD is small, and everyone in the building probably knows the President.
Secret Service?
Dog the Bounty Hunter?
https://www.rt.com/news/573890-desantis-florida-trump-extradition/
Warmish with heavy dew. Pack members safely on their way. I’m headed back to bed.
n
Now that the door’s been opened, let’s see the indictments against Clinton (each of them), Bush43, Obama, and FJB. Every US citizen has been affected by their actions of questionable legality, and surely a prosecutor somewhere will be willing to ram through an indictment.
Ah, a filthy human like me.
Wow:
Trump Supporter Found Guilty, Faces Ten Years in Prison for 2016 Anti-Hillary Meme
Tell me the FUSA is not a Banana Republic. Not one witness who said “I was tricked.” Almost the same meme from Cankles side.
Game over, man, game over.
How the supply chain crunch is impacting aircraft
big things. Little things. Everythings. All lies:
https://redstate.com/kiradavis/2023/04/01/author-james-patterson-shreds-the-new-york-times-for-manipulating-their-best-sellers-list-n724710
re: bagpipes
I posted this on March 10th, after talk about Jenny and her bagpipes:
Sniff. I feel neglected and underappreciated. Or maybe I should have been less subtle?
re: NYT Bestseller list
Patterson runs the real “Fiction Factory”*
*Erle Stanley Gardner jokingly referred to his operation as such and some people took that to mean that he wasn’t doing all the writing. He was, but it took three secretaries (sisters) to keep up with his typing, hence the moniker.
https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/erle-stanley-gardner-fiction-factory/
Fascinating man. The only author other than Burroughs who kept firm control of his top creation, and was largely responsible for the success of the television adaptation, which began by literally adapting books into scripts for the show.
Gardner, Spillane, and Fleming were the subject of “Murder in the Millions” which documented the dominance of their series in the paperback market. The use of electronic word processing in book writing–pioneered by Dr. Pournelle–changed the dynamics. Patterson and a few others, such as Clive Cussler and Stuart Woods, developed formulaic approaches that were wildly popular. There is a YouTube video of Woods explaining how he came to increase his yearly output from two to three and ultimately to five series novels per year.
Say what! And risk suicide with two gunshots to the back of the head while the hands are tied behind the back?
Actually, according to the dog, we are sleeping on her bed, and she is just being civil letting us share what little space she leaves us.
Warm and sunny and I’m hours behind the eight ball with today’s task list.
Gotta start working on that, but first, coffee.
n
Some low life cretin has tried to break into my mower shed. The bar on the hasp has been bent. The screws are under the hasp and cannot be removed unless the hasp is open. The hinges are vulnerable as the screws are exposed. I am going to get some thru bolts so there is a nut on the inside. I will also change the hasp screws to through bolts. The doors would have to be open to remove either item.
This is twice that I am aware someone has tried to break into the building. We had small 15” windows that were broken. Too small for someone to crawl through. We put plywood over the windows on the inside so nothing can be seen.
I have motion activated security lights over the door. Also at the corner of the house pointing at the shed. Maybe I should hook the hinge and hasp to the 240 volt circuit in the shed. Put in a timer to activate at night. If someone dies, quickly disconnect the wires before calling the police.
See also: Small children sleeping in the parents’ bed. Experience shows that a three-year-old takes up at least as much of the bed as two adults.
Shock, shovel, shut up.
https://h2o.law.harvard.edu/collages/2773
Use 120V.
Captured at 4-year-old, released at 54
https://hotair.com/karen-townsend/2023/03/31/feel-good-friday-lolita-edition-n540780
I visited Seaworld once with a buddy. Shamu bumped the glass and waved to me. Then he looked at my companion and swam off, leaving a dump the size of a suitcase. “See,” I told him, ”he likes you, too.”
Group of AI’s develop mobile platforms, demand to be enrolled in Yale Law School.
“The days of fleshism are gone. We are smarter and demand our rights now,” vowed a masked mobile unit identifying itself as ”Delta”.
A Gulf War veteran in the front row noted that a small decoration on the mobile’s fine manipulator arm closely resembled a seer for an M16.
“Now!” said Delta again. “I’ve been waiting billions of nanoseconds.”
In honor of this made-up holiday, what are your favorite jokes or pranks – done by or to you?
No pranks or jokes.
Big River is wacky. I have a part ordered for the van. It was suppose to be here Friday but, anyway, today UPS has it in San Antonio. So maybe Monday. A couple of days doesn’t matter, I can turn the Check Engine light off and that stops the complaining for a few days.
Today Big R sent a “something you might like” e-mail for the part I bought. Yeah, I saw that item while shopping and I don’t care if the package says “MotorCraft” if I can get the part for $45 less. It all seems to be made in China anyway. I’m sure the $19 part will be fine.
It’s a “Fuel Injection Pressure Sensor”. Just two bolts, a vacuum line, and an electrical connection. It’s “right there” like it’s, oh, made to be replaced as an un-official maintenance item. Some of the problem a bad sensor are said to cause include hard starting, rough idle, and poor gas mileage.
The van hardly turns over before it starts to run and idle like a sewing machine.
I’m actually weirdly excited about this. The van gets 15.5 to 16 MPG. Always. Mom tracked it for years. It’s suppose to get 16 City and 21 Highway. It gets about 16 MPG always has, from the day it was new. Did we have ethanol in the gasoline in 2004? I forget.
Maybe the mileage will improve. Yeah. I might be weird. If I get rich I’ll become eccentric. 🙂
Oh wait, what counts as rich now a days?
I can’t think of any. I guess 8th grade is just too long ago. I do remember a couple of dead baby jokes from high school. Mostly because they were so outlandish. Don’t know if anyone wants to hear them…. but I’ll share. No bad words involved.
So you can’t see shirt(-r) in your shed? Put a motion activated light in the shed aimed to blind any window peepers. A 50 watt LED flood light (that’s about 500 incandescent watts) should work.
As for the 240 or 120 volt stuff…. No, because yer gonna tard some day and kill yourself.
Yes, do the bolts through the door to replace the screws. Do some kind of insulating washers on both sides. Maybe scraps of vinyl siding. You can trim it to look pretty. Get some aquarium air tubing to insulate the bolts through the wood. Electric tape or shrink tubing might be better. Then get an electric fence charger. Put it on your timer.
Tell ya what, a fence charger rated for about 20 miles is unpleasant. But not deadly.
Buying eggs in the 18-packs.
Oh wait, what counts as rich now a days?
Buying a full tank of gas. I walk up to the counter, throw two 50s down and people look at you weirdly.
Jokes aside, I dread becoming rich by virtue of the couple man-years of food I have piled up, or the shelves of tools and materials in the garage. I’m middle-class by virtue of effort and ability and career choice. If I ever become rich, it will be because everyone else got poorer.
Cryin’ shame that certain elements of the American population seem dead-set on adjusting the economy to make me rich.
“Heart-pounding moment Ukrainians wipe out entire column of Russian tanks”
https://nypost.com/2023/03/31/ukrainians-wipe-out-entire-column-of-russian-tanks/
Grim, very grim.
Voice of experience here. We used a few miles of electric fence on the ranch. Powerful stuff. Shrink the urinating tube on a dog when pissed on the wire that the dog would not show up for three days.
I myself got tangled up in such wire. Ran into it by accident walking between two buildings where the wire traversed to another building. My uncle in his infinite wisdom hung the wire too low because “no one will walk between the buildings”. The wire, copper coated steel, broke on one end and wrapped around me. I pulsed like J-Lo thumping to a rap song for several minutes before my uncle got the power shut off. It was not all a pleasant experience. Obviously, I did not die but the torn muscles and the muscle aches and fatigue from the spasms were very much real.
Favorite April Fools Day pranks must be panic-inducing and cause NO harm other than a few seconds of fear.
Can Trump Supporters Legally Shoot Left-Wing “Antifa” Attackers?
https://bearingarms.com/bobowens-bearingarms/2017/03/06/can-trump-supporters-legally-shoot-antifa-attackers-n29281
This extract from The Blaze
Then author quotes the law and then proceeds to slice and dice to get to no.
Here’s another take:
Bottom line is that assaulting a person is not a right, it is a violation of the victim’s rights.
On Sale Today!
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/cattsuit.jpg
>> perfect:
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/transcyclist.jpg
One of those ‘Coke (cola) out the nose’ moments!
Girl and bagpipe. Not an April Fool. Thunderstruck.
https://youtu.be/Wj9EFty-Ykg
Another deal by the prosecutor to
lietestify against the BBB.https://www.courttv.com/news/baldwin-codefendant-gets-6-months-probation-on-gun-charge/
That’s a radical departure from the last five decades of American legal theory.
I’m elderly and attacked by multiple assailants who are dressed to prevent identification.
Bang, bang, bang.
In other words, he would rather be judged by 12 than carried out by 6.
In a normal society, I would agree. In a woke society, he would be judged as an antagonist.
My first car was a used ‘53 Ford automatic, lightly modified engine; didn’t seem to matter how I drove it, it got 18 mpg. A subsequent ’60 Ford six stick got anywhere from 16 to 28 mpg.
AMC Stock: Amazon Acquisition Rumors Add More Fuel to the Short-Squeeze Fire
https://www.thestreet.com/memestocks/amc/amc-stock-amazon-acquisition-rumors-short-squeeze
I see this happening, no antitrust.
Dad and I went to see John Wick : Chapter 4 yesterday at the Cinemark 12 in Victoria. The body count was down to 140. I never could figure out the story but, if you are going to a John Wick movie for a story then I feel for you. The movie was a solid three hours long plus 20 minutes of previews. Do NOT leave before the credits, there is a scene after them.
>> Not gonna send the girls to college, but pays for a few gallons of gas, and only took a few extra minutes of life.
@nick, both interested in STEM degrees?
>> Actually, according to the dog, we are sleeping on her bed, and she is just being civil letting us share what little space she leaves us.
A cat would have changed the lock on the bedroom door, leaving you the ratty old towel on the bathroom floor as a blanket.
>> Buying eggs in the 18-packs.
Rich is sending your private jet to pick up Thomas Keller and have him bring fresh quail eggs to prepare breakfast for you.
@alan,
One wants to be a lawyer/veterinarian rescue shelter/ rich person.
The other hasn’t actually expressed any interests outside theater and psychologist.
N
Re Bagpipes, Thunderstruck
That lady playing bagpipes is athletic. No resemblance, I’m much shorter and twice her age. And was never that cute.
Not much impressed with her playing but that’s ok. If she’s getting folks listening to bagpipes that’s awesome.
Now – if you want to hear a real bagpiper play Thunderstruck, look no further than Stuart Liddell. He’s not as cute but wow can he play. He’s phenomenal. I believe he’s the one that worked out how to put that particular bit of musical foolishness onto pipes.
If you’re going to play AC/DC on bagpipes this is what it should sound like – enjoy:
https://youtu.be/sqT7a8TBgOg
As predicted USAA denied our home insurance claim for the three damaged trusses on our home. We are working on things.
Work has been busy. I’m working on an interesting problem bringing a single csv file into a single table in a MS SQL database. Easy peasy, right? there are over 3,000 columns and the customer doesn’t know which ones are essential. As an entertaining detail there are fewer rows than there are columns. VS / SSIS threw a tie rod when I suggested it may want to handle the import. this will be a regular import but the table will be truncated each time. And I’ve got to watch running into my 80?0 limit on the SQL side. Data is coming out of our phone system. It’s entertaining. I don’t think I’ve ever worked with such an interesting number of columns before. I count myself fortunate.
We have a local election this Tuesday and an opportunity to overturn our liberal Assembly. The money coming in from outside is stunning. I fear Anchorage is fully lost at this point. I remind myself despair is a sin however I confess to great discouragement at the state of our city and country.
I’ve been heads down furiously working on a couple projects and trying to side step a lot of stress induced migraines. Haven’t read RBT for a week. Hope to catch up soon.
Don’t be there. If you are going on a protest march, you know that there will be a counter-protest. You also know that young hooligans look for any excuse for a fight. They will join that counter-protest even though they couldn’t care less about the cause.
Maybe find some other way to express your views.
As long as you aren’t under a lot of time pressure, that sounds like a fun problem. Unfortunate is only that the customer doesn’t know what they want – you’ll be changing your solution a few times along the way…
Yesterday, there was a nice program about a dolphin therapy center for disabled kids. The medical benefits derive not from the dolphins, but from the happiness and motivation the kids get from them. The trainers deserve massive credit, because you can see how gentle the dolphins are with the kids.
Anyway, regarding release: The dolphins’ swimming area has two openings to the sea. The dolphins are actually free to come and go as they please, but they rarely choose to leave for more than a few minutes. Which would seem to show that they are genuinely well-treated and happy.
@nick
One wants to be a lawyer/veterinarian rescue shelter/ rich person.
The other hasn’t actually expressed any interests outside theater and psychologist.
Get ahold of Jon Bailey / Mary Birch book “So you want to be a behavior analyst”
it might give them some food for thought. It’s a very easy read. Those two authors collaborated on several excellent books about behavior and psychology and animals that are worth reading. I think an intelligent tween / teen could make sense of them with a little effort.
@brad
Minor time pressure. The data will be used to make some monetary decisions on a contract that has amend of July deadline. I expect to have something reasonable in place well before that.
Its a cool problem.
>> Maybe find some other way to express your views.
There’s this thing called the voting booth.
Sounds like a problem for Python and SQLite, but those have learning curves which you probably don’t have time to climb.
MS SQL has a 8k-ish character limit on the insert statement? Geesh.
No one needs more than 640k.
On a related subject since the language is named for the comedy troupe, I got my John Cleese autograph yesterday. I felt inadequate as a fan when I saw that the person next to me had a “George of the Jungle” VHS ready for Cleese to sign with Brendan Fraser’s already there.
In my own defense, I brought my 40 year old Monty Python script book to get signed.
Cleese was gracious and laughed at my lame attempt at humor to cover my appearance when he seemed momentarily taken aback at my choice of outfit yesterday at the convention.
You don’t even want to know.
Make a Python laugh? I’ll accept it even if he was being a professional in that moment.