Cold, but warming. No rain today but it’s on the way. I don’t think yesterday got above 65F as the sun got hidden behind some overcast before noon, and never made it back out. Today might be the same.
I spent Monday driving all over town doing pickups. Did a big circle, mostly just outside the Beltway, which is the second ring road around Houston. 99, or the Grand Parkway is the third and isn’t complete yet, but where it is done, it is living up to author Joel Garreau’s prediction/theory/observation. In his book Edge Cities, which I recommend as a very well written look at how and why things ACTUALLY get built, he observes that modern mini-cities develop at the intersection of a ring and spoke road outside of a traditional big city. You can see it happening here in Houston, in almost real time.
Anyway, I did a big circle around Houston, only cutting through town on the east side instead of following the circle- mainly because there is water and garbage dump on that side, so the outer ring isn’t being built. It’s also massively built out with petrochemical processing plants, and they aren’t going anywhere.
I’ve got some more pickups to do today, but not in such a smooth circle. I’ll be out west in Katy, then south east in Dickinson. Then I’ll head home. It’s more of a diagonal line, that will combine several stops, but still seems like a lot of wasteful travel. I just couldn’t get my Dickinson pickup into my schedule yesterday so I will be retracing some of my steps. Also what I didn’t count on yesterday was about $30 in tolls. It’s easy to forget you are being charged with the autopay and open road tolling. I’ll try to take that into account today and save a couple of bucks if I can.
These pickups are some spare parts, some Christmas stuff, some domestic home use stuff, and a few items for the BOL.
In between yesterday’s running around I got some domestic bliss in. Laundry, picking up the kitchen, folding clothes. All the un-glamorous stuff that makes the household run.
Wife is still feeling poorly, and D1 is starting to complain she doesn’t feel well either. I’ve been overdue to change the HVAC filters and I think that might contribute. I feel it when I come home. Someone stopped the amazon subscription for the filters that would remind me to change them. Someone. Not naming any names, but IDK why they stopped, or why they won’t start them up again. There are mysteries in the everyday…. I have purchased some in the auctions in the mean time, and will be picking them up today. I’ve seen how nasty the current filters are, and I think it can’t hurt anyone’s health to get them changed ASAP. The red shirts don’t just die on away parties, they keep the dang ship running… when they’re doing the job. Dang red tunic looks terrible on me.
Filters. Wiper blades. Lubricants. Cleaners. All sorts of expendables. Do you have enough stacked?
If not, why not? Stack them up…
nick
See also: payroll deductions.
I’m surprised that there isn’t more of a push for a VAT in the US. If the tax is built into every item’s cost rather than a separate line item on the receipt, it’s easier to raise tax rates.
If the ORT works. It doesn’t more often than you would think without a large amount of conspicuous equipment involved.
I imagine every available EW aircraft capable of landing on a carrier or with the range to fly out of a NATO base in Turkey, Italy, etc. is on patrol off Gaza right now listening to all of the hardware in the hands of Hamas.
You could achieve the same effect by requiring retail prices to include sales tax.
The big downside of the sales-tax system is the assumption that all consumption eventually flows through retail channels. That’s not the case. There are lots of cycles between businesses. Even for individuals: lots of the more wealthy funnel their consumption through companies, trusts, or kinds of organizations. VAT would capture much of that revenue. Of course, VAT also requires more accounting, since all companies must pay it, not just the retailers.
50F and light overcast this am.
Coffee. Bean broth of the gods…
n
Below freezing here. Should get above freezing before noon. Chickens aren’t happy, especially with the addition of a light snow cover. Their coop is warm enough (thermostat set to keep it 35-42F) if they want to go in, which they never do during the day except to lay eggs. I need to clean the soiled straw from below the roosting rail. Again. These birds are, like, totally no class.
I have the patio cleared and ready to move the coop and run down to make their Winter nesting grounds. I’m putting it off as long as I can, partly to let them have as much time as possible on grass rather than on stone covered with cardboard and hay and also to avoid having them right next to the house. Stink, noise, you know. It’ll take a good part of a day to partially disassemble the run, move it, get the coop in, get it put back together well enough to keep predators out, and get the heated water dish, the heat lamp, and whatever else set up. Another good reason to put it off. Tell ya, these birds are interfering with my intention to be so lazy and motionless that people think I died last week or something.
Worth watching to see how armed robbery goes down in Chi-town, but also note the quality of the city’s surveillance video. Note that despite having hi rez video, and a full blown surveillance state, woman got robbed at gunpoint, and they still don’t have the bad guys.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12797245/Chicago-robbery-rifle-woman-video-police-suspects.html
n
Ah, Chicago, that toddling little town. Full of thugs, illegals, losers, welfare leaches, democratic officials and other nefarious people. Another place I never want to visit.
I knew it!!!
EXCLUSIVE: CIA’s secret office has conducted UFO retrieval missions on at least NINE crash sites around the world, whistleblowers reveal
The
AmishAliens are among us!It’s battlespace prep, I’m telling you… They’ll wait until they really really need to disrupt something to make the official announcement. Maybe the riots after Trump is assassinated…
n
@MrAtoz:
The Intelligence (sic) services woud classify the Gregorian calendar, if they thought there was some advantage in it for them.
Or try to, at least.
G.
I’m buying myself a new carry gub as a Christmas present. Looking for recommendations.
Required: Modern, lightweight 9mm, capacity 12 or greater, will have a red-dot added immediately if not from the factory.
Nice to have: Sights co-witness, major manufacturer for holster selection. Smallish but not necessarily sub-compact. I’m a big guy with decent-sized hands.
In descending order of preference: DA/SA with decocker, Striker-fired or internal hammer with safety, DA only, or Glock-style striker swimming naked. I’d prefer not to shoot myself when reholstering.
I’ve been renting, and I’m surprised how different they all are. The ones I should like, I can’t shoot well, and the one I shoot best doesn’t co-witness.
When I was a kid growing up in Michigan, it was illegal to include sales tax in the price of an item. It had to be a separate charge. There was a famous case of a Christmas tree lot that attempted to include tax for easier cash handling in the cold. When they were told to change their policy, they simply lowered their prices so the added tax made the prices in whole dollars.
Also, tax was collected on all retail sales, a SALES TAX. It was lower than other states that didn’t tax some items. When I moved to Iowa, their sales tax rate was much higher. They justified that by not taxing some food items, I believe like New York. That was before computers, and many mistakes were made. Shopping at the grocery store was a nightmare for me.
I bought a car in Michigan while an Iowa resident. I paid the lower sales tax. When I “imported” it to Iowa, they tried to charge me their higher sales tax. Fortunately, I had looked up the laws and argued they could not do that, because a car was no different than a box of Kleenex. Once the tax was paid, that was done. I had a photocopy of that law, and won right at the counter. Saved a bunch that some others probably paid. Iowa is still an expensive state.
Sadly, none of the above likely works anymore. The crooks are getting smarter.
Get the one you shoot best, and adapt the sights so they co-witness if that is a requirement. Handgubs are all about ergonomics and fit. Always go for the one that fits you best.
If you want more of something, subsidize it. If you want less of something, tax it. Taxing ‘value added’ has to result in less value being added.
BTW it’s never enough, no matter what the tax and how high. Canadia has a VAT, and STILL finds it useful to tax the Toronto area more with a “goods and services” tax. Miami has a special sales tax of 25% in the downtown “entertainment district.”
Starve the beast. All taxation is theft.
n
DA/SA with decocker. Hard to beat a CZ 75 SP-01. Reasonably priced, including second-hand, reliable, easy to get parts and accessories for. I had one, and I regret selling it, though I personally prefer the non-decocker SA versions.
Sadly, starving the beast can only work if you take away the printing presses.
A balanced budget amendment would do it, but it needs teeth. Serious teeth, like jail time for politicians who overspend. See Germany, indeed all EU countries, who just ignore the 3% max deficit rule.
@Nick
Canada calls it GST rather than VAT. We have federal GST (Goods and Services Tax) and provincial Sales Tax, which some provinces combine to create HST (Harmonized Sales Tax) and to try to disguise the provincial rate. One province (Alberta) has no Provincial Sales Tax, so only GST is paid.
Toronto tried to implement a municipal sales tax, or get a cut of the federal GST, but to my knowledge did not get to implement that. Toronto does have a separate Land Transfer Tax in addition to the provincial one, so real estate sales are more expensive there.
@gavin, thanks for the clarification. I remember that there is a VAT, and that all my receipts from Toronto had the separate G&S line item, didn’t realize they were the same… or did the airport use the HST? and I’m remembering Alberta rather than Toronto for the G&S…
Sometimes I filed and got it back, sometimes not.
n
Bigcorp I used to work for was headquartered outside Toronto, so I flew through there a lot. Also spent three months in Alberta for an oil company on a project…
n
Californication has no sales tax, 7%, on food. In my Kroger I saw a whole, uncooked chicken priced at $5.00, no tax. I bought a same size cooked chicken there for $10.70. Now the thieves charge $0.35 for the food $5.00 and $0.35 for the $5.00 cooking fee.
That looks like you’re taxed on the value add of cooking it. See how that works.
N
@nick:
Looks like uncooked food pays no tax. Cooked food pays tax on the entire cost – raw, plus cooking.
G.
>>Of course, VAT also requires more accounting, since all companies must pay it, not just the retailers.
Unless it will somehow further line the pockets of our Congress-critters, don’t expect much interest in changing the status quo.
>>Required: Modern, lightweight 9mm, capacity 12 or greater, will have a red-dot added immediately if not from the factory.
Nice to have: Sights co-witness, major manufacturer for holster selection. Smallish but not necessarily sub-compact. I’m a big guy with decent-sized hands.
…..
Although it’s becoming more common to have holsters that will support a red-dot or a laser, I’ve still run into gaps and have had to consider a more ‘universal’ holster. Just something to keep in mind.
Raw food in Texas has no sales tax. Ready to eat has sales tax.
For an example: You can buy a loaf of bread, bologna, mayo and mustard and make a sandwich. No sales tax.
Same thing pre-made has tax.
I can sort of see the reasoning. Sort of.
Say a $2 loaf of bread has twenty slices. A $4 package of bologna the same. Mayo and mustard add maybe three more bucks. Nine bucks for ten sandwiches if Mom lets you have double meat.
Pre-made and ready to go sells for $4 plus tax.
I figure the sales tax on prepared food is like a use tax. An extra tax on the already taxed sandwich container and the labor of assembling the sandwich.
I could be full of cattle processed hay but that’s how I understand it.
For extra fun. Try explaining to folks that “no, the rotisserie chickens have sales tax” even though the same size raw chicken is half the price. It’s sales tax on the preparation work.
We have a similar situation here in UK. If you visit a fish-and-chip shop, not a few of which have seating for patrons to eat their food, you pay no VAT on the takeaway, but 20% VAT if you sit down to eat. It’s the exact same food, but there’s a different tax classification for “eat in”, as compared to “take away”.
G.
That’s a pretty clever way to keep the rabble from loitering.
“Mike Elko contract: Not Jimbo Fisher money, but Texas A&M paying plenty”
https://www.chron.com/sports/college/article/mike-elko-contract-jimbo-fisher-18518278.php
“The Aggies officially kicked off a new era on Monday.”
Only seven million dollar a year ! A steal !
@paul:
Doesn’t seem to dissuade them much. My local chippy can seat about 20, and it’s often at least half-full, plus the queue of takeaway customers.
G.
>> Sadly, none of the above likely works anymore. The crooks are getting smarter.
Yeah, these days, many (most?) states have reciprocity agreements with neighboring states covering sales tax on motor vehicles such that the state of registration is made whole.
When I bought my LEAF from California, since it was delivered to me via transport to an adjoining state and no temp tags were issued, CA didn’t collect any sales tax.
This used to be true here in California as well, not sure that it is any more.
The person at the register would ask, and you could save a bit under 10%.
You could then eat your “take out” at a table inside.
I always felt a bit bad about doing it, because I was using their bags and napkins and take out cutlery, which meant they were making less on the meal.
Line up here for the “bells and whistles.”
Hey Tony, time to ‘splode another rocket.
https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/electric-vehicles/elon-musk-cybertruck-production-nightmare-tesla
Scott Adams has announced that OJ Simpson has finally found the killer. It is Derek Chauvin.
Scott Adams has now announced that the White House has decided to blame all future tragedies on Derek Chauvin starting with Climate Change, Inflation, and whatever the heck is wrong with Kamala.
“USB Cart of Death: The wheeled scourge that drove Windows devs to despair”
https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/25/windows_usb_cart_of_death/
“Stout heart a requisite for software engineers in days of yore”
“However, it needed operating system support, which is where Chen comes in. “The USB Cart of Death,” he recalled, “was one of those office carts – like a mail cart – but it was loaded with every USB device they [Microsoft] could get their hands on.””
“”We’d have, like three USB mice, four USB keyboards, maybe a USB-connected printer – USB everything – and they were all connected together on this office cart, connected through a whole bunch of USB hubs…””
“Imagine a cart laden with connected USB gizmos, daisy-chained together with hubs several levels deep. And a single cable to plug into a suitable victim.”
Oh look what I missed out on by not going to work at Microsoft.
Of course, I would have missed on the customer bringing his PC to my office to show me that our software sucked on his PC, giving bad calculations and crashing all the time. I immediately dissected his PC and found out that he had managed to shove a 16 Mhz 80387 math co-processor chip into a 25 Mhz Pentium. He was actually unhappy with me when I stated that he could not do that.
“Another central banker admits the truth about the US dollar”
https://www.sovereignman.com/international-diversification-strategies/another-central-banker-admits-the-truth-about-the-us-dollar-148479/
“Politicians within US government have routinely demonstrated an outrageous level of pettiness, incompetence, and the inability to solve even the most basic problems.”
“They have absolutely no control over abhorrent deficit spending. They go into debt to pay people to NOT work. They ignore downgrades of their sovereign credit rating. And they actually cheer themselves when the deficit is “only” $2 trillion.”
“America’s central bankers, meanwhile, conjured trillions of dollars out of thin air without any clue of the repercussions. They failed to predict inflation. They failed to diagnose it. They failed to do anything about it.””
We are six years away from the projected failure of the USA Dollar. Here is a projection of what life in the USA could look like when that happens. “The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047”
https://www.amazon.com/The-Mandibles-Lionel-Shriver-audiobook/dp/B01EGDJOA8?tag=ttgnet-20/
2029 is probably peak retired baby boomer in the USA. The math is not pretty when Social Security and Medicare are distributing $2 trillion per year EACH then.
https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/electric-vehicles/elon-musk-cybertruck-production-nightmare-tesla
Why does the Cybertruck remind me of the Delorean ?
“WSJ report uncovers ‘dark’ content on Instagram Reels”
https://finance.yahoo.com/video/wsj-report-uncovers-dark-content-175936337.html
Porn for pre-teens, lovely. Just what we need.
Vantucky had state, county, city, and neighborhood sales taxes totalling 10%.
Amazon was actually noncompetitive with Newegg and many other vendors in its home state until the Supreme Court overturned National Bellas Hess a few years after we moved up there. Even Ginsburg couldn’t stomach that one and joined the dissent to no avail.
You’re on your own with Miami-Dade. Any Florida county with a “Mayor” (like “Judge” in Texas) is a Dem machine stronghold even if precincts here and there vote Republican.
TAMU’s Willie Taggert.
Go read up on Willie. The legend is that he never took the Florida plates off of his car during his year in Oregon waiting to be the human sacrifice in the post-Jimbo era in Tallahassee.
The sad part is that Willie did decent work at both my undergrad alma matter and Oregon before Jimbo dragged his tree to the curb and set off the firestorm in Tallahassee.
He never noticed problems with other programs?
Yah, I’ve been blamed many times for pointing out others’ errors or other failures which caused trouble for others at work or otherwise.* I’ve become less tolerant of it with repeated exposure, to the point that I don’t even try to soften it when I’m giving someone the “bad news”. Yes, for children I’ll be kind and point out where they went wrong and how to fix it and how to do better next time, but for adults the approach is “Handle your shit.”
Amusingly, a number of coworkers or other involved or observing parties appreciate my ability to get things done or to get problems handled … until they screw up and I point it out. Then it’s all “You were mean!” or “Cheryl complained that you spoke inappropriately yesterday.”
* That probably doesn’t quite hit the theoretical maximum distinct variants of “other” in a sentence, but it’s pretty good for off the cuff.
We had a machine called Teletubbies at the Death Star, an unpatched Windows XP system which was directly plugged into a unfirewalled Ethernet switch on the company’s Internet node located on the roof of the building, feeding the worst the net had to offer into the IP stack.
If we put an install CD into Teletubbies and our VPN driver stack configured/ran successfully with the autoinstall despite all the crudware, a release was gold.
Teletubbies was never trusted to be connected to anything but the open node. It ran 24/7 with the node’s dual utility power service, data center UPS, and diesel backup generators.
We provided node-level service to Time Warner as well as the corporate customers so any machine out on that subnet without a firewall was a huge target.
I’m not sure I’d trust a modern motherboard with a WiFi transciever to be a Teletubbies.
A 25 MHz Pentium? I don’t remember one running less than 60 MHz.
Pentiums also had floating point capability on the same die, which led to the infamous divide bug problems.
Math coprocessors had some kind of marshalling protocol similar to GPUs today IIRC. A mismatched clock would be a problem.
As a user of USB this is actually a heart warming story.
I had a nice WinNT (Win2000?? Been a while.) box at work that you could reliably blue-screen by plugging any USB device into. Why it even had a port I don’t know. We had to keep a parallel port backup cartridge device just for it, long after other machines went to better USB stuff.
The last line in the Register article, tho:
“We suspect there are some lessons there for the current Windows team. ®“
The chickens were out of the run four hours or so today. In theory they were in the garden, grubbing or doing a dust bath or holding a Chicken Parliament or whatever they wanted to do. In practice, over half of them escaped the garden and were wandering around the yard. The hens often escape the garden, because they want to go to the coop to lay an egg but or just because, but it’s usually just one at a time.
Once I finished up what I’d been doing and checked on them, I opened the garden fence for the birds to go to the run and the garden crew walked in without coaxing and the escapees all came running at top run-flap speed. It’s been chilly and windy despite being mostly sunny and they all wanted to go home and get food and a drink and couple booked it straight up to the coop. Two-thirds of the hens laid today, pretty good for the time of year.
I roasted and carved a second turkey on Sunday. (Due to a lack of communication, my wife and I got three frozen turkeys last week. Well, it was on sale. Cheap protein.) I put all of the scraps and scrapings into a dish for the chickens. (The bones went into the crock pot to make broth, of course.) Not quite cannibalism. They ate it all yesterday except for the tail, which I guess was too much gristle and bone for them even cut it into pieces. I tossed that out into the yard yesterday evening and it was gone by this morning, no surprise. I doubt that this did anything to encourage the forest critters to spend more time prowling around the chicken run; they already know that there’s food inside. That’s the other reason I want to move the coop and run to the patio next to the house for the Winter, to add a bit of discouragement to the predators and to put them closer to where I spend most of my time so I can go out and kill whatever needs killing.
A 25 MHz Pentium? I don’t remember one running less than 60 MHz.
Were the first 32 bit Intel cpus just named the 80386 ? Seems like I remember that now. And the first of those were 16 Mhz.
It is all coming back now. Then we had the 80486. Then the 80586, the Pentiums.
It has been a long and winding road. The minicomputer versus the microcomputer wars were almost over before I even knew that they were happening. None of us realized that the microcomputer was killing the minicomputer even though we had a microcomputer on every desk.
We were developing software for minicomputers back in the 1990s even though the technology was dying early on the vine. We all thought that engineers would be moving to minicomputers such as Apollos, Suns, IBM RS/6000s, HP UNix, etc. We were wrong. Everything went to the microcomputer, the PC.
Devils Go Down to Georgia: Biden Spotted Deplaning With Bill & Hillary Clinton & Michelle Obama”
https://rumble.com/v3yfofr-devils-go-down-to-georgia-biden-spotted-deplaning-with-bill-and-hillary-cli.html
Oh crud, is Big Mike going to do it ?
“If all money becomes worthless, then so does all government, and all society, and all standards”
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2023/11/if-all-money-becomes-worthless-then-so.html
“The title of this article is a quotation from the book “Before the Deluge” by Otto Friedrich, examining the economic collapse of the Weimar Republic in the 1920’s, and how that paved the way for the rise of Adolf Hitler.”
I will repeat myself from earlier:
We are six years away from the projected failure of the USA Dollar. Here is a projection of what life in the USA could look like when that happens. “The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047”
https://www.amazon.com/The-Mandibles-Lionel-Shriver-audiobook/dp/B01EGDJOA8?tag=ttgnet-20
2029 is probably peak retired baby boomer in the USA. The math is not pretty when Social Security and Medicare are distributing $2 trillion per year EACH then.
Ah, “Prizzi’s Honor” is in the burn slot at the moment. I remember really liking that. Might have to move it to the “watch soon” pile.
n
n
80386 and 80287 co-processor; my first upgrade from my Trash-80, excuse me, Tandy Radio Shack (TRS) 80. If I remember correctly the 80486 came with the co-processor built in.
“Charlie Munger Dead At 99”
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/charlie-munger-has-died
“Berkshire Hathaway Inc. reported on Tuesday that Charlie Munger has died at the age of 99.”
“According to the family, he passed peacefully this morning at a California hospital. He would have been 100 on January 1st.”
Well, that was unexpected.
If I remember correctly the 80486 came with the co-processor built in.
All 80486 cpus had the 80487 built in but it was bad on about half ??? of the chips so they came out with the 80486sx (no math coprocessor) that had the 487 links burnt out.
A 486dx had a math coprocessor. A 486sx did not have one.
Added – Lynn was more accurate above. I went for quick answer.
Neighbor here mentioned last week that a new chicken, very scrawny, had appeared in his yard. Tree roosting, though. “Evolution in action” as Niven might say, the humans & coyotes & hawks are breeding smarter chickens around here.
Well, not the humans.
The school of hard knocks. I had a customer call in and complain that his new 80486 was slower than his 80386. I gave him the standard answer of bring your PC in and I will take a look. That was my first encounter with a 80486sx. Our software, slightly math intensive, ran 100X SLOWER than the 80486dx. Another customer unhappy with me but it was not my fault. The old shoot the messenger.
I think he took the PC back and got the 80486dx version. I always shipped our calculation engine with both the math coprocessor and math emulation libraries so we could run in either case. It was just that the emulation libraries were … slow.
“Napoleon is a visually compelling disappointment”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/napoleon-is-a-visually-compelling-disappointment
and
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/napoleon_2023
Well, that is too bad. I have been in the Louve and the Napoleon apartments. I was hoping for a neat movie.
The 80386 was Intel’s “brand name”, and the follow-on system was the 80486. Somebody copied the functionality, and started selling those “80486 clone” chips, and Intel sued, claiming that “80486” and “486” were copyrighted names. The courts rejected this, ruling that Intel could not copyright a number.
So what would have been the 80586 chip needed a new name; thus “Pentium” (based on the latin word for five) was born. Alas, the first production run of “Pentium” chips were flawed and useless. So Intel slabbed them in lucite with the Pentium logo, and gave them away as key rings. At the time, I was working for an Intel contractor, so I got a few, and I still have one.
When Intel was ready to roll out the next version, I was hoping that they’d follow the “Pentium” pattern, and call it the “Sexium” (based on the latin number six) or “Sexxy” chip, but they didn’t.
Killeen tops Austin among top Texas cities millennials moved to in 2022
https://www.mysanantonio.com/realestate/article/texas-millennials-18517234.php
Regarding ‘range chickens’ and tree roosting:
I moved to a house on 3 acres in a rural area in the foothills above Sacramento back in the 1990’s, and the house came with a small flock of ‘range’ chickens. There was a big willow tree in front of the house – that’s where the chickens roosted at night, to our surprise. We would often hear the coyotes howling at night.
The chickens were a bit smarter than the two geese that also came with the house. Two ‘goose shells’ (just the feathers) were found one day. The coyotes didn’t bother the goat that was in a fenced area that included the pond.
The chicken flock included a couple of roosters. We found out after we moved in that roosters don’t crow at dawn. They crow all day and all night. Including just outside the bedroom window.
We decided we didn’t want to be ‘chicken parents’. Put a notice up in the local feed store advertising free chickens. A lady came by one evening and caught all the chickens that were roosting in the tree. She shimmied along the branches and grabbed them by their feet and tossed them into her car. Got all of them. Including the noisy roosters.
There was another instance where wife went outside at night to get something out of the car. And something caused her to climb up on the roof of the car for a few minutes before hurrying back inside.
The next day, we saw some large cat footprints in a muddy part of the driveway. And a neighbor reported a partially eaten deer carcass hidden in the berry bushes on his property. So, a cougar had visited, and probably was in our driveway when wife went out to the car.
“Seagate CORVAULT 4U106 Updated with 2.5PB Capacity”
https://www.storagereview.com/news/seagate-corvault-4u106-updated-with-2-5pb-capacity
Now that is a rack !
Looking at another shop auction online.
Looks like he had a summer maintenance routine:
Partially open all drawers (bench, tool box, parts organizers, etc.). Make sure dust collector if OFF. Turn floor fans ON to recirculate anything that falls on the floor. Spend an hour or so randomly crosscutting 2×4 stock and select hardwoods into useless scrap. Stop periodically to blow off sawdust with compressed air. Make sure not to drain compressor at end of day.
In summer fill the humidifier and turn it to HIGH. Leave shop windows open for maximum condensation on metal parts. In winter run humidifier and a couple of kerosene heater and leave shop to cool all night with with windows CLOSED.
Carefully inventory parts organizers and check local stores for sales on any brands and sizes that are different from what are already owned. Label with masking tape using marker in fist of non-writing hand.
Open all sets of drills, sockets, and misc small tools. Pull a couple at random, dump into waste basket with scoop of sawdust and add bottle of water. dump wastebasket from last maintenance, fill open slots at randowm , making sure brands are mismatched.
Fill hand sprayer with Coke and mist bottom parts of all metal cabinets. Put some mist in the air for good measure.
There must be a YouTube channel that teaches how to do this efficiently.
And I love the auctioneers that list from the lables, failing to note that the 250-feet of electrical wire is 90% used, or the box of 100 has 3 left.
Spent the day running around. Did most of my pickups though. Spent part of this evening pulling stuff from storage to take to auction. Ordered some parts to fix a couple of things for the auction.
Talked to my client and will pick up a check next week. That will help a lot.
Got the all clear on the last of my medical checkup stuff, so that was good.
A long day of messing around.
Think I’ll do a bit of relaxing before bed.
n
I had a cousin-in-law a bit like this. He was a general contractor, and did (cosmetically) really beautiful work. You didn’t want to look to hard at the structural aspects, but that’s another story.
Anyway, he had immense piles of tools. No visible organuzation. Many of them rusted. I just didn’t understand how a professional could keep his tools like that…
n
Remembering Johnny “Mike” Spann, 22 Years After He Became The First American Casualty Inside Afghanistan after 9/11
https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/11/remembering-johnny-mike-spann-22-years-after-he-became-the-first-american-casualty-inside-afghanistan-after-9-11/
RIP
We have many such men on the ground in countries all over the world. At a time when all of their efforts are undone by the single act of a demented traitorous executive giving billions of dollars to the largest sponsor of state terrorism in the world whose main focus for decades has been to destroy the United States, my hope is that each will realize that their country’s ultimate hour of crisis approaches and they are needed at home to defend her, lest there be no country to come home to in the future.
@brad
“Anyway, he had immense piles of tools. No visible organuzation. Many of them rusted. I just didn’t understand how a professional could keep his tools like that…”
I was given early instruction in the requirement of returning tools to their proper place clean and ready for the next use. In addition to the usual grinder with fine and coarse wheels, Dad had a salvaged double shafted motor with a fine wire wheel on one side and a buffing wheel on the other. It was mounted to a board so it could be clamped in the Workmate and used outside when weather permitted.