Forecast says, clear but with something blowing in from the Gulf of America. It was mostly clear and really hot yesterday. There was a bit of cloudiness to the northwest, but metro area all the way down to NASA was clear. Did I mention it was really hot? Getting a cooling rain in the day is something I kinda got used to.
I spent all afternoon doing pickups. Drove a whole lot in a really big figure eight. I was in Seally, Cypress, Webster/crystal lake (NASA), Pasadena, and just north of downtown before returning home. Filled up the truck. Moved a bunch to the “take to BOL” pile, still have a bunch to go through. I looked at one invoice and it really was more ‘wants’ than ‘needs’. There was some medical stuff, but nothing major. I will be pulling back a bit in the next couple of weeks, unless it’s really helpful stuff, and really cheap. More solar, gubs, defensive stuff, or food would all be helpful. Craft supplies for the kids would not.
Today I’ll do one pickup that got missed earlier in the week, and one that I got to a little too late to actually pickup. The missed one was a new auction, so they kept the stuff for me. Turns out I never got the email with the invoice or pickup instructions. It’s happened before with other auctions. Sometimes the management software just pukes. The rest of the day will be spent at home doing home stuff. I might show D1 how to use the pressure washer so she can wash “her” car. And maybe I can get her to wash mine too. Probably not.
Time to do a little work on improving my situation. Stacks are good for the day.
nick
Amex and Costco were both part of the Gecko’s stock portfolio until he unloaded Costco in 2020.
Maybe the arrangement with Citi continues due to Buffett’s bitterness over missing out on the big run in COST since the point where he sold.
This wouldn’t be the first time that happened. Buffett destroyed Dexter Shoe out of spite, and with it went much of the remaining shoe manufacturing infrastructure in the US based in New England.
COST is overpriced for a company that lives and dies on cashflow, however. Many on Wall Street would like to see that share price at about half of where it is right now.
From the “$20 Reeboks” desk.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14897505/miami-bbl-trade-women-risk-lives-cheap-surgery.html
And lest you think it is lower demographics seeking the cheap procedures, the fancy/creepy mall in Austin out near where the big boss lives has an entire store dedicated to “BBL” surgical recovery underwear. Snatched Bodywear. Apparently, it is a chain importing the products from South America with a mail order operation based in Miami.
Plastic surgeons do not have a governing board authority like most of the other specialties. Many did surgical residencies, but not all.
In a border town south of the Rio Grande? All bets are off.
I really despise stupid programmers that think Chrome is the only browser that anyone should use. I attempted to open another account at my CU using MS Edge, and the application just quits. The buttons don’t work, nothing on the screen works. No error message, nothing. The same application works in Chrome.
Idiot, lazy, incompetent jerk-wad programmers. I could say something else but I refuse to stand in line.
The financial institutions got burned by Microsoft abandoning Explorer. Testing will target Chrome and maybe Firefox.
As late as 2018, when I left CGI, the legacy AMS collections tool we maintained as part of that acquisition still targeted Explorer and even mixed in Java applets.
“BEYOND PARODY: The Steve Miller Band Cancels All Remaining Tour Dates Due to Climate Change”
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/07/beyond-parody-steve-miller-band-cancels-all-remaining/
Yeah, pull the other leg, it has a bell on it.
Tickets sales were bad.
I have to run Explorer for access to embedded web servers in gear, mostly cameras, but also some hardware in the rack. Not only that, but I have to run it in legacy mode, and enable activex.
Some old .gov sites require it too.
Edge has what? six users worldwide? And Ray is #7? Lazy programmers used to support MS and leave the others to flounder, like opera and FFox. Now they skimp on Edge. The world turns.
————–
80F and sunny when I got up. I’ve had a pastry and most of a mug of tea. Might have some coffee this AM too.
————–
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-14908031/obsessed-80s-thousands-spent-reliving-decade.html
Because the 80s were the best of the decades!
n
Tours are expensive, especially for a big band, but they are usually where the band makes most of their money. Merch is king.
n
Fly like an eagle, crash like a geriatric chicken.
If it’s something important, try adding the “User-Agent Switcher” plugin, and set it to tell websites that you are using Chrome. Since Edge uses Chrome code internally, it is unlikely there will be any problems at all.
But you’re right, it is very stupid. Web standards exist. All modern browsers implement them. So it shouldn’t make any difference which browser you actually use, unless the website is being extraordinarily weird. The browser identification is actually mostly used for fingerprinting. Which is another good reason to tell your browser to lie.
Apparently, as of the end of June, the really good ad-blockers no longer work on Chrome. Variants like Vivaldi and Edge will soon follow, if they haven’t already. There is a “light” version of uBlock Origin that still manages some blocking, but a piHole is your friend.
I was just reading an interesting article. There was something of a spike in temperatures starting just after the massive eruption of Tonga-Hunga that pushed zillions of tons of water into the stratosphere. Spparently much of it is still there, raining out slowly.
Since H2O actually *is* effective at retaining heat (unlike CO2 we should actually be in the midst of a cooling trend. The warmists never mention this, of course.
After a warm June, in our part of Europe we are having a cool July. High today around 24C (75F).
“Seagate unveils 30TB HAMR HDDs for the masses — laser-powered IronWolf Pro and Exos drives are now widely available”
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/seagate-unveils-30tb-hdds-for-the-masses-laser-powered-hamr-drives-are-now-widely-available
This may be the last of the spinning hard drives as the static memory SSD drives are growing in size greatly.
“Refinery closures present risk for higher gasoline prices on the West Coast”
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65704
Nature abhors a vacuum. Something will happen.
Maybe people will stay home and walk when gasoline hits $10/gal in Los Angeles.
Maybe the city will turn gasoline stations into electric stations.
Unless you have a massive media collection, what are normal people doing with multi terabyte drives?
For almost my whole time using PCs drives FAR exceeded most users’ needs.
With 13 streams of video from my cams I burn thru 8TB every couple of weeks, but I delete rather than retain. And my entire music and DVD collection fits in just a couple of terabytes.
Younger users don’t even keep local copies of anything, they use the “cloud” and online services…
n
Maybe people will stay home and walk when gasoline hits $10/gal in Los Angeles.
– there are very few people in the LA basin that could realistically walk to anything they need. Certainly not to work. There are smaller communities inside the area where you might be able to, if you severely restricted your activities. Pasadena, Silverlake, Venice (maybe). Other beach communities.
The distances are large, but even worse, the infrastructure isn’t there. There are mountains and valleys in the middle of everything, right in subdivisions. Lots of places where even the streets don’t go thru because of a natural feature.
Plus, walking exposes you to predation.
n
Most of the fed sites I access balk at Safari, so I use Chrome. These are teat-sucking sites I earned for exemplary service to the country. LOL. A lot of the State sites we access to pay taxes also balk at Safari “limited access, use Chrome…”
I keep Chrome on all of my devices.
A Camaro. Her real name wouldn’t happen to be Donna, would it?
She affects like a Donna.
I assume my neighbors got an offer on the wife’s garage queen Camaro which was too good to refuse.
The wife’s new garage queen is an ID Buzz.
Shoulda kept the Camaro.
Yes, the Buzz is back from repair. I thought they had come to their senses on that purchase and unloaded it before the next model year hit, but nope.
I wonder this, too. We have an extensive music collections, not so many videos. But decades of personal files, business files, email, etc.. Total size of everything is still under 1TB. I can only imagine that people who needs piles of storage have massive video collections.
Sadly true of all but the oldest cities in the US. And even the old cities (like Boston) – the newer suburbs are not walkable.
Re predation: this is, unfortunately, a wonderful newish thing in Europe. A tourist town near us just had a major robbery. The police figure they have almost no chance of finding the criminals, because they are almost certainly a gang out of France. Black immigrants from the French colonies, who else?
The police request help finding them, and published photos. Photos with the faces pixeled out. Brilliant, that’s really going to help :-/
Sorry for the law-abiding black folk, but too many people who share their skin color are immigrants, and way too many African immigrants are criminal.
It would be a huge effort, but closing our border to France to anyone without a valid work permit would be a massive improvement.
The 80s were the last time period during which the US created real wealth building out the PC industry.
Everything since has been about rearranging the deck chairs.
The vehicle looks bigger than their previous reigning monarch Bronco sitting on the throne.
6000 lbs.
The Bronco moved to the single wide garage space. It barely fits, but I doubt that the Buzz would be able to enter that space.
So much for the microbus concept.
Plus, walking exposes you to predation.
Los Angeles just burned down thousands of homes. I doubt that the city officials care.
Outerwear. The constant in the CHAZ mess in Seattle was the pricey coats on the leaders. I’ve seen that trend in other rentamobs in the US during colder months.
Karen Bass is a Communist literally trained in Cuba.
Even considering her for the VP slot in 2020 has cost the Dems Dade County in every major FL state-wide election since that November.
Younger users don’t even keep local copies of anything, they use the “cloud” and online services…
My father has six hard drives and apparently keeps everything on the cloud. I cannot find anything going back a few years like tax returns.
Backups ? We don’t need no stinking backups.
Re: Hard drive sizes. At work, we handle enterprise level storage needs with small business equipment. My group is responsible for maintaining almost a PetaByte of data. Our go to drives right now are still 20TB Seagate Enterprise drives, but we are slowly adding 24TB drives. It is not for the faint of heart.
I expect the total amount of data to double in 5 years.
The drives are all spinning metal SAS. SSD still doesn’t have the capacity, and to get close the cost is still astronomical.
And, didn’t Newscum sign a bill into law where the goobermint can buy burned out properties for pennies on the dollar to build Section 8 housing. Current owners are hampered by LA goobermint with not even being able to clear their lots. Do you think Newscum will pay fair market value? Gotta take care of the crimmigrants and homeless first.
I’m getting ready to head out but I thought I’d do a quick factory reset on the samsung phone I bought at auction to replace my S10e. It’s an S23+ and it is huge by my reckoning. Several different methods on youtube and I can’t get one to work. I’ll try more later, but now I have to get out of here.
n
On the Settings menu (swipe down from top/top right of screen, tap the gear icon), then type in ‘factory reset’ in the search field. One of those choices should get you to the screen that does the factory reset.
After the reset, go to the ‘updates’ screen (use the above process to search for that) to download/install all updates.
On Android phones as Old Guy says it’s usually under System as Factory Reset
8. My wife uses Edge.
Insane amount of data. If individuals and teams had some sort of cost, they might clean up. Since it’s all electrons, nobody has to care. Except the IT sots who have to backup a petabyte.
With the new flooring in the living room I discovered there is a bump where I have the sub-woofer. It wobbles a bit. A couple of square inches of cardboard box under one corner fixes the wobble. I could move it over a foot or so but then it all looks sloppy.
The bottom of the woofer is plastic and lots of ridges. Stiffening ridges? The woofer fires down. There are no flat surfaces to stick felt feet. There are “sockets”, not quite the size of an AA battery where one might plug in feet.
So I looked. “yamaha subwoofer feet” doesn’t work. Lots of garbage links.
The piece of cardboard works. Someday I’ll get fancy and have a carpet scrap underneath.
“You load 16 Peta,
and what do you get?
Another day older,
and deeper in debt.
RayK doncha call me,
because I can’t go.
I’ve gotta tar -vz,
the Company store.”
– with my apologies to Tennessee Ernie Ford.
There are internal costs billed to individual groups, but that is funny money, often used to launder profits from regulated activities at utility companies or government contractors.
I forgot to mention the phone is locked with a pin code so I can’t get to the menus.
I should be able to get into an android boot loader screen, with choices including factory reset, but so far the only screen I can get offers “normal load” “fast boot” and “diagnostic” – which gives an error message about “no command present” and then a little picture of an android with his chest open.
I’ll try another method which involves a cable instead of just the power and volume buttons.
n
@Nick; for the factory reset on a pin-locked Samsung S23 : Try this (from https://eu.community.samsung.com/t5/galaxy-s23-series/locked-out-of-s23-ultra-after-reset/td-p/10720288
Other solutions on that forum.
Hi, Mr. OldGuy! Thanks for posting good info on Samsung phones.
Please also apologize to the songwriter and original performer, Merle Travis.
Chet Atkins, as a young man, was inspired to play guitar by listening to Merle Travis. He once said If it hadn’t been for Merle Travis, I’d still be looking at the backside of a mule.
Chet Atkins and Doc Watson both named kids after Merle.
RayT doncha call me,
Fixed it for you.
“You can call me Ray, or you can call me K, but you don’t have to call me RayK”
I worked on a product line that had been dominant in the industry for decades. In the late 70’s the attorneys got very concerned about anti-trust, and a lot of information was shared with competitors. That changed in the late 80’s, and by the early 90’s there was a full-on effort to patent everything possible, and market share ratcheted up over about ten years. Never heard a peep from the regulators. Innovating and improving an old product line where all the players are established multi-billion dollar companies is just not going to get the scrutiny absent some kind of shenanigans.
The regulators abhor monopolies. If the market is an oligopoly, with a small number of competitors, they have a much more difficult time, and often threaten but do little to effect change. Bill G perjured himself in federal court and was not only not prosecuted, but the feds blinked and chose not to break up the company.
Microsoft would have been a much more dangerous competitor separated into two companies, OS and compilers based on the Issaquah Plateau and applications on the Redmond campus.
Of course, Gates didn’t see it that way, but the company didn’t sell off the land for Campus 2.0 until nearly a decade later.
Damn. News Publishers Take Paywall-Blocker 12ft.io Offline
The long national nightmare is over.
Kimmel next.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/tv/2025/07/17/stephen-colbert-late-show-ending-may-2026/85264811007/
The long national nightmare is over.
And not a moment too soon.
Why are they leaving the Late Show corpse to keep twitching for the next 10 months? Why not pull the plug NOW?
Contract. Plus, people will tune in, especially if Kimmel goes too.
A Look at Airport Director’s Killing by ATF Agents Shows Nothing’s Changed Since Waco
https://bearingarms.com/tomknighton/2025/07/17/a-look-at-airport-directors-killing-by-atf-agents-shows-nothings-changed-since-waco-n1229292
Straight-up murder.
I’m surprised that Knighton doesn’t have any weasel-words for this one. He does for Waco and Ruby Ridge.
WSJ Releases Alleged ‘Letter’ From Trump to Epstein. Trump, Vance Respond
https://twitchy.com/aaronwalker/2025/07/17/trump-jd-vance-responds-to-wsjs-epstein-letter-story-n2415827
Trump will own the WSJ.
– weasel. Straight up weasel.
ATF executed another innocent person. They’ve destroyed lives and livelihoods. PAST time for them to be disbanded, or re-orged at the least.
All the people involved in Ruby Ridge and Waco got promoted. Except the dead people. They got buried.
———
Why should any cop have camo? They aren’t supposed to be hidden lurkers. Anytime the camo goes on, each person and each case should need a permit, like a hot work permit. Why do you think you need to hide or obscure yourself? What measures have you taken to protect lives and property? Who will be providing oversight? Is this job necessary and why?
n
people will tune in
–what people? What is the demographic? I haven’t seen a late night show in 2 decades or more and I grew up with SNL and Second City.
I bet the viewership numbers won’t even pay for the electricity to run the transmitters.
n
– this is what happens when the physical media goes away. You could BUY a newsmagazine, hand it to a friend, copy articles or comics for display, the friend could hand it to another, the magazine could be in a waiting area where hundreds could read it and put it back on the rack, etc. ebooks and the amazon platform made the same changes, no more loaning, reselling, or owning…
n
– this is what happens when the physical media goes away. You could BUY a newsmagazine, hand it to a friend, copy articles or comics for display, the friend could hand it to another, the magazine could be in a waiting area where hundreds could read it and put it back on the rack, etc. ebooks and the amazon platform made the same changes, no more loaning, reselling, or owning…
You will own nothing and be happy…