But not today. Hot, humid, and sun beating down by afternoon… with temps in the mid 90s. Like yesterday.
I was so weary yesterday that I didn’t get much done. Some auction stuff, but not much else. Had to get the kid from school in the early afternoon too.
I’ll be busy today though. I’m headed to the BOL on Friday, so I’ve got stuff to get done today. I’ve got a couple of auction pickups. I’ve got a couple of maintenance things to do. I’ve got to get the back fence stabilized a bit better than the wife and kid left it. Yesterday the neighbor did some work on theirs but just left a big hole where ours meets theirs that the dog could easily get through. I had to move some chain link fence to the area. That’s when I realized I’d better do something about the fence to fix the temporary repairs with some more temporary repairs.
Oh, I got an email from one of my storage units that many units were damaged by water and I should check mine out and get any damaged stuff out before it rots… I’m hoping it’s not my units that were damaged. I guess we’ll see soon enough.
So no rest for the weary today. Yesterday will have to be enough.
Get back to work slacker.
And get back to prepping, stacker…
nick
So I ordered some hardware bits and pieces from a major hardware retailer (they also have an online store). I got a bunch a separate packages: 25 screws in one package, some cable in another package. One package per item! Two items never arrived, I complained. One missing item arrived, again in its own package. The other item (4 cable tensioners) didn’t. Screw it, I went and bought them in a store today. While we were gone, what arrived? A package containing an entire box of 20 cable tensioners.
What horrible logistics! Sending so many individual packages requires not only postage, but someone to pack them, plus packing material. Sending too much product. They must lose masses of money on stuff like this. Crazy.
I thought “Heartland” was on Hallmark Channel.
I swear I remember seeing it on one of the MeTV imitators in our area.
With the impending dismemberment of Disney and Viacom, the cable TV operators may realize that they don’t have to give in to the extortion of ESPN and “Sponge Bob” and finally offer al-a-carte services which their subscribers have asked for going back decades.
I’m hoping that the MeTV 24 hour cartoon network – now there is a concept … imagine it – is successful and inspires a number of smaller, more nimble players.
Content is available and the demand is there.
Bing is down this morning, and therefore duckduckgo as well. It must be pretty bad for an outage like this.
The Round Rock High School graduation proceedings from last night.
During the Principal’s speech, the Superintendent infamous for allegedly beating his mistress and having parents arrested over a mask dispute is center screen.
The Amish female with the dreds to the far right is the leader of the ISD (Texas term for school board) who protects him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3j0-lbXRB8
“Woke” hasn’t stopped decidingTexas school board elections yet. The group of voters who support the local board are a weird coalition of parents and businesses concerned about their ISD-supplied soup bowls.
Kids and wife are off to the salt mines, I’ve had my breakfast bacon and coffee and now I’m ready to go!
So time to leap into thar intarwebs for my morning dose of insanity. It’s an inoculation against the future.
Yeah, that’s right, an inoculation…
n
Unlike the jabs pushed by the Orange Man among others.
Still part of the control.
And Skippy is still waiting for that knock on his door.
BTW, commencement at God Forsaken Blue State U is this morning. I figure he’ll have his drink on solid by early evening tonight.
@Nick, did you figure out why you lost so much oil so quickly from your Ranger?
Get the vernacular right! It’s them thar intarwebs.
Bella Hadid makes a bold pro-Palestine statement in Arab-inspired dress while out on the beach in Cannes
– doesn’t see the irony that she’d be beaten by the morality police for appearing in public wearing that dress in any of the arab states…
n
@Nick – I noticed that Docker now has a Linux Mint 19.3 image. That might solve your problem of needing a separate Linux install on the DVR machine just to run the process grabbing video from the camera.
Of course, then you have to go down the Docker rabbit hole, but the upside is Hot Skillz!
– well duh. Since when is it a crime to be white and pretty?
n
@greg, appreciate it, but I don’t need any hot skillz…. I can barely tolerated the changes when windoze updates…
and this whole website building thing is breaking my b@lls.
n
Docker – yet another “skill” I intend to avoid. When I need containers, I use LXD, same as I have done for ages.
What I really don’t understand: I was just reading an article about running services on EC2. The company puts their app into docker, and then runs it on a dedicated EC2 instance. Holy Unnecessary Overhead. Containers make sense if you’re running multiple services on the same server, and want some semi-light-weight isolation. They make sense if you want easy deployment on different platforms. But for dedicated deployment on what is already a VM? In what world does that make sense?
What makes Docker interesting for Nick’s specific situation is that the software would allow him to run the Linux process under Windows without the weight of a VM or the hassle of dual booting.
I‘m actually surprised that Microsoft hasn‘t integrated Docker functionality into Windows with a proprietay version similar to what IBM has done on RHEL/Fedora with Podman.
Maybe it is coming.
Ah, so I would reinstall windows, then install docker, then the package or whatever it’s called for the NVR application?
It’s currently running on out of support mint, directly on the HP hardware.
n
About the same time it became a crime to be a white heterosexual male.
If I cop a plea can I get time in a women’s prison?
Shite. Just got pix and update from my buddy at the BOL. Big branches down all over the place and no power. I’m loading up all the stuff I brought home, fuel, gennies, power cords, tree cutting stuff, and heading out. Dunno about posts, I’ll leave a stub in place for Fri, Sat, Sun…
n
I note that it’s time to renew hosting costs for this place. (I get those notices as the ‘geek contact’ for the hosting. Barbara graciously pays those expenses that allow us to complain about things here.
I asked if she needed help in the renewal costs, and she said no. But if anyone is inclined to support her funding the hosting here, she said that a donation to your local library would be appreciated (but not required).
Thanks, Barbara, for letting us use this place. And all you others that make this an interesting place to visit – even if I don’t agree with everything that might be posted here. I still visit many times every day.
@Nick: Be safe!
I took a box of books to the library a couple of months ago. They seemed insulted. Weird. I take stuff the library thrift shop once in a while. They seem happy there.
I have a couple of boxes in the van to drop off.
In many cases the libraries have limited shelf space and out of date (Windows 3.1 for Duummies anyone?) and duplicate (no call for 10 copies of an older James Patterson) titles go right into the trash bin. The library thrift stores are a little more lenient as they need to replenish their stocks as titles sell.
I now read e-versions free from my local public library (including James Patterson’s}.
I have several bankers boxes of books ready to donate to the local book fair.
That said, if donations are ever needed to cover a shortfall here, count me in.
Regarding library donations; I suspect that the libraries would rather have monetary donations, rather than books. There might be a ‘friends of library’ group that would like actual book donations for their book sales. But a monetary donation to the library itself would allow the library to use the donation to meet their specific needs. You should contact the library to determine their preferred donation process. Some many not be able to accept cash donations due to their ‘ownership’.
As for donations for costs here, Barbara has always been able to cover the expenses, and has not requested any donations to help with that. She, I believe, enjoys the fact that this place continues to be a place for visitors to participate in and enjoy discussions on a wide range of subjects.
Even if we don’t always agree with each other, the discussions are generally polite as opinions are expressed. At least, that is my hope.
One of the nice things here is that one can hold different opinions. Sure, we’re mostly conservative, but different opinions on vax, abortion, religion, and other spicy topics come up, and it’s OK.
This seems to be a common enough problem with storage units around here that it’s common for people to put down wooden pallets and elevate their stuff. It won’t do you much good if the units gets a few feet of flooding, but if it’s usually just an inch or two, then it couldn’t hurt.
Anchorage is so screwed. Our conservative Mayor lost his re-election and a puppet from our Assembly steps up in July.
She’s about as far left as they come, with a wide vindictive streak and a loathing for the first amendment if you dare say anything conservative.
She won fairly handily.
With Anchorage lost, holding most of the population of the state, Alaska too is in deep trouble. We’ve truly lost our way.
If you have books you want to get rid of, bring them to the local jail. Maybe not the “Windows 3.1 for Dummies” books, but fiction, self-help, and general-audience history and science and “practical stuff” is always welcome.
I suppose it depends on whether the local deputies/correctional officers are jerks, but I’ve never had a problem.
Jenny, while kidnapping, arson, torture, and murder should not be the go-to solution for most problems, they should have a place somewhere in the toolbox.
“Tesla leaves out delivery goal of 20 million vehicles a year in latest report”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-drops-reference-goal-delivering-143539555.html
That is a lot of vehicles.
With Anchorage lost, holding most of the population of the state, Alaska too is in deep trouble. We’ve truly lost our way.
The FSA (free stuff army) really wants their free stuff fairly badly and is willing to go to extreme lengths to get it. They don’t care that their children and grandchildren will be slaves to the future USA, whatever variant of the USA that is. I do not know how to get around this problem without a civil war.
The entire US market in 2023 was 15 million vehicles sold.
Toyota sells 11 million annually around the world.
“New preseason hurricane forecast is highest ever issued. Brace yourself, Florida” https://www.yahoo.com/news/brace-yourself-florida-latest-preseason-143302922.html
“NOAA is predicting that 17 to 25 named storms could form this year, with eight to 13 powering up into hurricanes and four to seven of those reaching major hurricane status, Category 3 or higher. That’s above the average: 14 named storms, 7 hurricanes and 3 major hurricanes. In fact, they’re the highest ever forecast by the federal agency. In 2020, NOAA had predicted the highest number of storms of all time. That season wound up with 30 named storms, 14 of them growing into hurricanes.”
We are all going to die.
@brad
One of my favorite people for increasing my understanding of dogs is conducting an online seminar in July, hosted by Puppy Works. Perhaps your wife would enjoy. I don’t want to spam folks with ‘sales’ links. Seminar can be easily found on the Puppy Works website, look for Suzanne Clothier. I’ve attended several of her in person workshops, and had a one on one training session with my reactive dog a decade ago.
Suzanne Clothier is always time well spent if one has any interest in dogs.
The hummingbirds arrived early this year. March 20 instead of the usual April 1st. They go through a pint of sugar water a day. I just finished the ten pound bag of sugar I opened in March.
They are fun to watch and sugar is cheap.
Essentially, that would be the procedure, but Docker requires a relatively recent CPU and Windows 10/11.
I retired my Q6600 last year in order to play with Docker, but then work turned into the fastest ramping product in company history so I don’t have as much time to play as I used to.
Lately, I’ve been experimenting with installing Windows XP clean on the Q6600.
“Out of support” Linux is still much more secure than recent Windows. 19.3 isn’t that far out of support.
EC2 is about on-demand computing resources, and that involves Kubernetes and Hashicorp products Hot Skillz in addition to Docker.
The most relevant example I can think of is a streaming service like Netflix. All of the major players depend on Amazon for delivery except for Apple, who has a lot of infrastructre dependent on Azure.
Streaming storage, bandwidth, and electrical power costs money. It is actually more “green” to watch a movie on a BluRay player in your living room than to stream the film from a server located God-knows-where.
My division of the Death Star based in Tampa originally belonged to IBM as part of the Advantis boondoggle. When I left almost 14 years ago, all of the surviving Sears stores still had Windows for Workgroups 3.11 systems related to Advantis running in back rooms doing something which no one still on the payroll completely understood but was vital enough to the infrastructure that the machines had to stay active until the locations shuttered.
I imagine the machines are still there in the remaining Sears. Dunno about K-mart.
“Windows now has AI-powered copy and paste”
https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/21/24161778/windows-powertoys-advanced-ai-copy-paste
“What if your clipboard were a place AI could work its magic? With the PowerToys Advanced Paste update, it’s all possible (for a small fee).”
Get ready for “I can’t paste that, Dave.”
No. The big companies want to track the user’s activities during the day using the AI in order to train a model to do the employee’s job.
We are under tremendous pressure at work to do all editing in VS Code with one of the “assist” applications.
They’ve laid off fussing at me for the last few weeks since I found char *cp = calloc(0, size) which probably came from the AI.
My lead recently sent me some AI-generated code that was supposed to help with my assignment to read a particular standards-based file format a few weeks ago. Literally, the code was FILE *fp = fopen(“file.ext”, “r”; if(NULL != fp) { fclose(fp); }.
Thanks. That was a huge help.
“Tomorrow War: The Chronicles of Max [Redacted] (1)” by J. L. Bourne
https://www.amazon.com/Tomorrow-War-Chronicles-Max-Redacted/dp/1451629141?tag=ttgnet-20/
Book number one of a two book dark fantasy dystopian series. I read the well printed and and well bound trade paperback published by Gallery Books in 2016 that I bought new from Amazon. I have ordered the second book in the series.
Max [Redacted] is a new highly trained USA operative who is a member of a secret group that performs “jobs” for the USA President. He and another more experienced operative fly stealth ultralights into Syria with electronic machinery to plant a worm into their national phone wifi system. They get in, get out, and the worm spreads around the world in just days, wrecking financial computer systems across the globe, including the USA. Then things really get bad.
I liked it ! A financial apocalypse in the USA is on my short list of near term apocalypses. For those who are interested in the future long term financial apocalypse of the USA, I recommend reading “The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047” by Lionel Shriver:
https://www.amazon.com/Mandibles-Family-2029-2047-Lionel-Shriver/dp/006232828X?tag=ttgnet-20/
For those who do not like Lionel Shriver, I recommend “Distraction” by Bruce Sterling:
https://www.amazon.com/Distraction-Bruce-Sterling/dp/1857989287?tag=ttgnet-20/
For those who just want a short term financial apocalypse of the USA, I recommend “Buck Out” by Ken Benton:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1514666979?tag=ttgnet-20/
The author has a website at:
http://www.JLBourne.com
My rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars (1,644 reviews)
Lynn
If I hadn’t caught that, the upcoming release to the factory would still be wetting itself upon system startup.
The secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.
I haven’t made the portion size enchiladas because I got an attack of the lazies. I have the parts. Also a bit of paralysis of how to assemble the meals. I figured that out today. Take a Corelle soup bowl, the size that is about 4 inches tall. Line with plastic wrap. Put into the freezer to duh and lift out of the bowls and vac seal plastic wrap and all. Re-heating will be simple.
Today I went to the HEB for beer and half and half. I grabbed a package of deli Swiss. The Kraft is ok but lacking in flavor. I remember when I was a kid Swiss having lots of holes and being almost as sharp as sharp cheddar. The deli cheese I bought today is an improvement but still bland. I expected better for $8 a pound. But tastes change.
I have the idea of adding chorizo to the hamburger for the enchiladas. Zip up the flavor. Worse case is the dogs feast like kings.
The chorizo is next to the breakfast sausages, like Jimmy Dean. That’s also where the Italian sausage is hidden. I know the stuff comes in a one pound chub. Not today..Several varieties of chicken sausage. I’ll pass on that. They have a Hill Country Fare 8oz package of chorizo. $1.38 which is about half of a one pound package. So I added two to my cart. Oh! There’s a coupon! $1 each if you buy two.
I bought four. I’m going to cook a package tomorrow. If I like it, I’ll go back for more to stock the freezer. I forgot to buy bread, anyway.
NASA satellite images of visible light before/after derecho in Houston showing effect of power outages: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-weather/article/nasa-before-after-houston-power-outage-derecho-19474554.php
Power is out at the massive VA complex in Temple, TX this evening. My wife just received email that the out-patient offices are closed tomorrow.
We’ve had some rain in the last few days, but nothing more than just enough to wet the driveway.
I had 1 and 5/8ths this morning. and, cue up Jim Spencer, Peas Sized Hail. It was pretty loud with a metal roof. It’s al soaked in.
We did not do the usual walk to the gate and back this morning.
San Antonio has seen only traces of precip in the last 5 days. If you can send some of the water this way, I’d certainly appreciate it!
“DEVELOPING: American Servicemember Critically Injured, 2 Other US Troops Wounded at Gaza Pier”
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/05/developing-american-servicemember-critically-injured-2-other-us/
I wonder when the tanks and armored vehicles along with the crew served weapons will arrive in Gaza ? Will anyone stop Iranian ships from docking at the new pier ?
Seems that these were non-combat injuries.
Well, bless you RLTS and needing a ‘beard’ for your .mil internet in the sky…
I’ve got high speed internet, but no cell. The local towers are up, my booster is up, but the antenna got “bumped” by a tree. A tree that only stopped falling on my house because it hit the chimney instead and knocked the top part of that off…
Running on gennie, honda inverter running on propane… the mod I did to the propane venturi plate seems to have worked. It was a lot easier to start and adjust now that there is an air hole for the idle circuit.
Freezers were still frozen, but the kitchen fridge/freezer was close, 31F in the freezer area. That stuff is on the “eat before the other stuff” list.
I’ve got internet and light. I’ll work on the rest tomorrow if the power co-op doesn’t make progress tonight. They just drove by, so at least they are here to look at the issues.
I’ve got big limbs down all over, some are kinda tricky looking, and a tree leaning against the house. I’d love to pull it back vertical and try to save it, but I don’t think it works that way. It’s one we were hoping to save as it probably stabilizes the hill the house is on…
Tree guy is going to be busy. Some of the damage would have been prevented by the tree work I’ve not found the time to do… A whole lotta procrastination is kicking my ass this week.
More later, I need to figure out some dinner.
n
Co-op did some chainsaw work on one of the downed lines, and presumably on the other that I can’t see or hear.
Maybe we’ll actually get power back.
Had kielbasa sausage pan fried with chunks of onion and crumbled crackers to soa up the butter and fat… Having some oreos and NA beer and thinking about a tiny little fire on the patio or the dock. Lots of bugs out though… Cool breeze outside. kinda stifling indoors.
n
We had visitors the last few nights due to power outages. My girlfriend’s younger son, his girlfriend, and their 3 cats. Their apartment didn’t have power until today.
In the 35 years she’s lived in this house, my girlfriend has never had a pet. Her ex-husband and her older son were allergic and asthmatic. So it was a new experience for her. She likes cats and some dogs, and when we started dating she visited my house a bunch with my 2 Danes and my cat, Cat. They have since passed on and I moved to Houston to move in with her.
A couple of nights with cats in the house, and suddenly now they’re gone, the house seems empty.
Never did learn their names. Nonsense syllables strung together. But I ended up with the queen bee leader of the pack on my lap a couple times. I got that apex predator look from her, eye-to-eye. You know the one. “I like you. I’ll kill you last.”
Never did learn their names. Nonsense syllables strung together. But I ended up with the queen bee leader of the pack on my lap a couple times. I got that apex predator look from her, eye-to-eye. You know the one. “I like you. I’ll kill you last.”
That is high praise coming from a cat. They are definitely predators.
I’ve decided to shower and head to bed. I’m sure tomorrow will be bright and early and long and hot.
Discretion is the better part of valor… it’s a tactical retrograde movement…
n
If you have books you want to get rid of, bring them to the local jail.
Rules vary from place to place. Daughter is senior librarian at a major state prison in CA and they are not allowed to have any hard bound books, even the law books are soft bound. She also has five yards and a main library so has to have six copies of each book or multiples of six copies each.
If you have books you want to get rid of, bring them to the local jail.
Rules vary from place to place. Daughter is senior librarian at a major state prison in CA and they are not allowed to have any hard bound books, even the law books are soft bound. She also has five yards and a main library so has to have six copies of each book or multiples of six copies each.
Wait, do you have to donate six copies of each book ?