Still the same weather. Chased all over town by thunderstorm cells. Some people got none, some people got the paint washed off their cars. More of the same today, tomorrow, and maybe Thursday too. It’ll be a soggy 4th if we don’t get a break.
So I did some auction stuff in the morning. Then I rousted D1 and got her to drive the minivan all over Houston to do my pickups. I got to do more Driver’s Ed with her, specifically what it feels like when you spin out the back end (impressive in a front wheel drive car) and what it feels like when the anti-lock brakes engage. Lots of wrecks on the highways, but fortunately none were us. Luck was with us.
I did get most of my pickups done, but we did miss a couple as the day got pretty long. 5 hours of freeway driving, some in pouring rain, but she either doesn’t recognize how tiring it is, or won’t admit it. I can see when she starts making dumb mistakes though. I’ll get the last two pickups today. Or maybe the last 5.
D1 is going to drive D2 to her band thing and let me do my thing.
Did I mention that this sh!t is HARD? If you know, you know. That’s how the cool kids are saying it.
Meanwhile the world turns, the elephants dance, and the mice are rightly nervous.
Stack some mouse food so you can stay in your den…
nick
Here in the US, the Corolla Cross took over the Toyota size class previously occupied by the RAV4.
The Corolla Cross is based on TNGA-C, essentially a Corolla, but rolls off a Mazda assembly line in Alabama, right next to the CX-50, its fraternal twin.
I don’t know if either vehicle gets sent to Europe. CAFE distorts the US market due to Americans weeniedom (is that a word) about gas prices.
The long standing rumor is that Toyota has a Ford Maverick competitor in the works based on the TNGA-C platform, but little trucks are a fetish item in the US and difficult for manufacturers to price properly.
I noticed the other day that the 2025 Maverick gained some heft when I saw a new one parked at … Trippiez!
A day of reckoning is coming for many “good” schools with the beginning of wage garnishments for delinquent student loans.
Too many institutions have grown fat, dumb, and happy on DEI and the nationalized student loan largess.
You jeopardized someone’s arrangement where they received in-office sexual favors in return for looking the other way.
Bl*w jobs are the coin of the realm in Corporate America.
Digging through my dresser drawer last night looking for an HSA card, I stumbled across my pre-Real ID Texas drivers license, still in pristine condition even after spending over eight years in my wallet.
The old license plastic feels very different from the new card material.
Sitting in the same spot in my wallet, the Real ID developed a large crack down the center in less than a year.
At some point, I should get a replacement before the license cracks completely into halves.
If you’re paranoid about Real ID, again, I doubt the new card fluoresces in RF anymore.
Well done for figuring that out, Brad, and for once it wasn’t the cables!
We have had the central network switches fail both at the main residence and at the BOL. I think the former sometimes has dirty power, and the BOL is at altitude (or what passes for that here) and the locality gets a lot of lightning strikes as a result. We are on our third broadband modem in five years there. Fortunately, the telco replaces those at no extra explicit cost to me. I now keep spare routers and switches on hand, since if I am without connectivity, it is rather hard to order replacements! 🙂 If the telco would let me, I would keep a spare one of their modems on hand too, but they won’t do that. Roll on the glass fibre connection – it can’t come too soon.
Today’s source of electrical woes is going to be the heat. The official forecast is for up to 38C / 100.4F, temperatures for which this country is not set up. W1 tells me she had a brown-out at work already around 9.00 this morning, and that was before the heat really got going… I am sheltering in my east-facing basement home office space with the blinds drawn.
In a little while, the sun will progress around the corner of the building, so my office window will be in the shade. I did a few small manual tasks in the garden before the sun got high enough to shine over the hedges, but today is going to be a stay inside and stay hydrated day. I might sneak out mid-afternoon to the local handmade ice-cream shop as a treat, or I might just make some of my own in the freezer. I noticed we have a bag of frozen raspberries, which would do nicely…
I don’t know about the US models, but the European Toyota models are definitely “growing” over time. We have a 20-something year-old Yaris, which is about the size of the current entry models, the IQ or Aygo. My mother-in-law’s new Yaris Cross is not very much smaller on the outside than our seven-year-old RAV4, which was the last non-hybrid AWD petrol model, though the Cross is definitely less spacious inside, and somehow also feels less roomy than the old Yaris that we have. I think the trouble is an over-dimensioned centre console, which wastes a lot of comfort space. Are enormous cup holders really that important?
Lynn, still praying for you and your parents.
Best wishes to everyone, and stay cool!
Oh yes, it is a thing.
I suspect that when they get survey feedback on models there is always a line where respondents say “… Great car but it could be just a little bit larger… ”.
So the next model year is 10cm larger in each dimension and 100kg heavier.
Then eventually the small car becomes midsized, and a new actual small car is introduced.
If you want interior volume, buy a Nissan Rogue .., like Brie drives in those commercials.
Sure the three cylinder engine and/or CVT transmission will go splody before 100,000 miles, but you will have more space.
The RAV4 and CR-V have always lost to the Rogue when the cross shop is about space.
The Yaris sedan became a rebadged Mazda 2 before Toyota pulled the name from the US market.
Everything gets bigger over time. Vehicles especially.
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81F with patchy clouds. I’m steeping my cuppa.
I have some office work to do, then I’ll head out for pickups.
Looking at the budget for the month, and for some reason June was an expensive month. Even without WDW and Universal, and a kid flying to spend a week with Grandma…
n
Snicker.
Almond Joy.
Sky cleared and is now seamless blue, edge to edge.
n
The OBBB has passed the Senate. However, we the no good dirt people, have no idea what remained in the House version. “We have to pass it to find out what is in it.” There better be language cutting off all bennies to crimmigrants. Defunding PP and NPR. No more tax on suppressors, etc. I have my doubts about all of that.
Re car sizes, I see them as shrinking. Go to a museum and look at the cars from the 1920s. Some were huge, as much as 50% longer than recent cars.
I have a 1968 Mustang, which was considered a small-ish economy car in its day. I have an illustration of a Mustang superimposed over a 1956 T-bird 2 seater, and they are remarkably similar. I always wanted a 2 seater, and realized I actually have one. Sorta.
Today, a 1965-70 Mustang looks huge in a parking lot with new cars.
No matter what’s in the bill, we’ll get screwed and it won’t be what we want.
n
No one currently sells a “small” car in the US, and the big family saloons with wagon variants are gone so families either buy crossovers or half ton trucks as grocery getters.
To appease suburban women buyers, Toyota moved the Highlander to the 4Runner size class and the RAV4 onto the Camry platform. Then they created the Corolla Cross to fill in that missing size.
Toyota initially put the knife to the Matrix to make room for the Cross, but that has essentially come back as the Corolla Hatch.
The irony of the bigger “small” cars is that engines have generally shrunk.
@jimb,
not in that way, comparing old models and styles to post 1975 models, but in the way of a model is introduced and each subsequent version is bigger.
Ranger pickups are now as big as the Toyota full size was when introduced, and almost as big as older f150s.
“Mini” vans are bigger than ever.
n
I doubt there is anything in the law enabling Medicaid that supports enrolling illegal aliens. Trump should issue an EO excluding them, purge the rolls, and tell the courts to pound sand. Then propose an alternative: Take those payments from Federal district judge retirement plans.
I’m reminded today, while working on my hobby project, of a truism.
Programming is easy and fun. Software is hard and tedious.
Also, not unexpectedly, trying to make sense of government databases is a headache.
Who makes a table named “header” that contains multiple records over time per primary entity?
I feel like this is an IBM kind of thing.
Beyond the CAFE issues, once the Panther platform saloons were history, Ford couldn’t risk letting the old Ranger design get used as a grocery getter by suburbanites, especially the housefraus.
The new Explorer platform is a rear wheel drive truck-like vehicle which could be used for a pickup design of old Ranger size, but the price tag wouldn’t be appealing and they would risk cannibalizing the sales of the new Ranger.
The pre-2011 Ranger/Explorer platform is why we have tire pressure monitors on every new vehicle.
States run Medicaid with funding from the Feds. The Parliamentarian was right to set 60 votes as the requirement to make changes to the law to deny illegal aliens Medicaid.
I see they effectively gutted the rollback on the green energy scam.
How about the House and Senate all “voluntarily” adjourn to the new holding facility Alligator Alcatraz pending deporting every last one of them to Gaza? I’m sure there are thousands of volunteers that would be willing to pick them up and make sure they get there safely. And they’d need their staffs, too. And families. And reporters to cover their move.
https://dailycaller.com/2025/06/30/jaguar-europe-car-sales-non-binary/
If the prices on E-types crater correspondingly I could buy one and a parts car or two, then all I would have to do would be to figure out how to find $250,000 to fund a full-time Jaguar mechanic.
I seem to have filled up all 5,000 spaces. No worries. The first 5,000 took 8 days because of “regulatory delays”–we should be able to add another 10,000 in another eight days.
Does that include the signs directing the alligators to the new buffet?
Alligator Alcatraz belongs to DeSantis. I’m sure a whole wing is reserved for Disney employees who get caught in one of Sheriff Grady Judd’s sting operations in Davenport.
With a special cell reserved for Iger.
Trump tweeted about reopening the actual Alcatraz on the flight home after touring Florida’s new facility.
Well, shoot. Parts swapping instead of troubleshooting is going to cost me $15. Not a big hit, but annoying. I’ve got a piece of AV gear to sell, worth a couple thousand bux, but it would occasionally have a bad fan noise. I blamed the CPU cooler, but I just figured out it’s the antec psu. Problem is, even though I had the correct size cooler in the stacks, I decided to just order a new one, since the item is worth so much, and I don’t remember where I got the one in the stacks. 3 hours later the psu fan makes the noise…
I might just change the fan in the psu, they should be standardized.
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Did my pickups for today. I was right down to the wire for three of them. I got new tires for my lawn tractor, some medical stuff, and some other household stuff. A couple of things for my non-prepping hobby too, both to use and for resale.
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I didn’t hit post comment… so I took the psu open, there is a failing cap and some heat marks around a transistor, so I’d like to replace it. I tried 5 from the stacks, and they all misalign in some way. I might have to order one as I think fan, caps, and transistor adds up to “swap it out.”.
n
Harder than needed to swap out the psu. The case is punched to exactly line up with the power in socket and the power switch. Every single psu seems to have a different arrangement of inlet and switch… so I ordered a used psu. At least the seller hooked it to a psu tester… and it seems to be what he sells primarily. I’m hoping that the fan is good.
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It was 101F in my driveway today, but is only 88F now. I finished mowing the back yard. No sun, and cooler than this afternoon.
n
>>The man charged in the killings of a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband one week ago was a “prepper” and had at some point given his wife a “bailout plan” in case of “exigent circumstances,” according to an FBI agent investigating the case.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/21/us/vance-boelter-minnesota-suspect-prepper-hnk#webview=1
A “prepper?” Say what…
MS killing “Authenticator”.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-14865891/Microsoft-Authenticator-app-axed.html
unless it’s invisible to the user, I don’t use it, so am not affected.
n
In our previous house, we had an extra room that I was able to turn into a library. Floor to ceiling books on the walls. It was lovely! When we moved, though, that itch had been scratched. We sorted out the books – anything that was never going to be read again, and that didn’t hold sentimental value, was tossed. That was easily 90% of the books. Probably over 2000, but we didn’t count. The remainder now fill two shelving units in my pseudo-man-cave, where I have our home server and my fitness equipment.
4,000 for me and at least a thousand for the wife. That is 5,000 books spread over the house.
Trying to be fair. I have the new router that can do multi wan inputs. It’s the white trash Chinese knock-off of Lynn’s Peplink.
Paul, you rock ! I had a big laugh from that.
“4,000 for me and at least a thousand for the wife. That is 5,000 books spread over the house.”
It’s a start.
How a fake astronaut fooled the world, broke women’s hearts, and landed in jail
https://www.space.com/astronaut-imposter-how-a-con-man-fooled-the-world
We had a Come To Jesus meeting today with 3 doctors, a PA, an RN, and us. Mom, me, middle brother, and my son.
2 months to stregthen for endoscopy for gall stones.
1 month to recover for gall bladder removal.
1 month to recover for move to rehab.
Dialysis three or four times a week.
We cannot attend him every day. We cannot attend him every night.
The end of tuberculosis that wasn’t
In the 1980s, many thought tuberculosis was on the path to elimination. In reality, more were dying from the disease than ever.
https://ourworldindata.org/the-end-of-tuberculosis-that-wasnt
The first factor was a big spike in TB deaths due to susceptibility of HIV-positive population. Unfortunately, the graph of WHO data–Tuberculosis deaths by HIV status, United States–only spans 2000-2023, so does not show the beginning of the upswing.
The second was drug resistance.
The third:
which just kind of sits there. The article just published this week but the subsequent discussion end in the 1990’s.
So I looked at that and the obvious inference is with criminal neglect of our border security for four years we can expect another spike in TB and other diseases as the unvetted legions of unclean spread their filth throughout the population.
Today a reporter asked why Mayorkas is not in jail. I want to know where he is hiding.
“unless it’s invisible to the user, I don’t use it, so am not affected.”
I saw a teeshirt:
“My password is the last 8-digits of pi”
so I changed mine to the next-to-last 8-digits.
In junior high a friend of mine found a book with Shanks’ 707-digit calculation of pi. We spent an afternoon carefully typing an original and one carbon, so we would both have a copy. Unfortunately, we later discovered that the book predated the discovery that Shanks went astray at the 528th digit. Good thing we never used it.
I’m a bit rusty, but pi never develops a pattern, so couldn’t you just take any 8 random numbers and expect them to appear in pi somewhere? Then you could CLAIM they were numbers 467-476 because who would check??
—
Besides, by law, pi is 3 now, right?
n
The short answer is Yes. Ask your favorite search engine or AI and get a more detailed answer.
It was ann obvious appeal to the rainbow crowd. Which is not exactly Jaguar’s clientele. WTF did they expect to happen?
Jaguar was already struggling as a brand. This likely will kill it entirely.
Wolf whistle to the leftist weenies: a prepper automatically means a rightwing fruitcake. Which is rich, seeing as this guy was actually a left-wing fruitcake.
They are be removing the ability to store passwords and credit cards in Authenticator. The app will continue to provide 2FA codes.
I doubt very many people used Authenticator as a password manager in the first place.
I have seen more tattoos in this hospital than I have in the last year. Mainstream society has left me.
When you arrange your clothing to display your tattoos, something is crazy.
The OBBB has passed the Senate. However, we the no good dirt people, have no idea what remained in the House version. “We have to pass it to find out what is in it.” There better be language cutting off all bennies to crimmigrants. Defunding PP and NPR. No more tax on suppressors, etc. I have my doubts about all of that.
Looks like all of the spending cuts were removed in the Senate.