Cold. Yeah, seriously, 50F is cold here. I’ll have to run the heat if it doesn’t warm up. Cold morning, nice day. Like Thanksgiving Day.
Well, we did the traditional feast yesterday. Kids contributed with pies and a casserole. I just ate. And while they were cooking I did some sorting and disposal of canned food, some work on my cameras, and a couple of other small things. I took it easy, but didn’t want to lose all my momentum.
Today I’ve got a couple of auction pickups to do. One for resale, one for Christmas presents. I’ve got some people covered, or more than covered, and some that are currently present-less. And I haven’t found good White Elephant gifts for my non-prepping hobby get together. That means I’m on the prowl for good/appropriate gifts.
I also have stuff to do on my truck, like headlight replacement, radio install, stereo install, cleaning… and stuff to do around the house. Many of my neighbors started their Christmas decorating already, so I might do some of that today too. Who knows? If I make plans the universe is bound to screw them up somehow, so better to just see what I get done.
The first pass through my stored canned food tells me I need to do some more culling and cleanup. Add that to the list. Buying food and stacking it is a solid prep though.
I’m always gonna tell you to stack something, even if it’s just good experiences. They can keep you warm and sane when the going gets tough.
We can all use a little help when that happens.
nick
Friday. Hurray. I have the day off work, but plenty to do, so time to get up. Wishing you all a good day, and not too many turkey hangovers!
Nick, thanks for explaining the festive recipes. My late mother sometimes made a similar minced-meat pie. Perhaps I should have a go. I have a lot of minced venison. Hmm…
The “gorton” sounds a lot like what the French would call rillettes de porc, or the English, potted meat, the difference being mostly in the seasoning. Both are delicious if done right.
Spatchcocking the turkey is a good approach. I am not a big fan (I prefer goose), but if I had to do one, I would spatchcock it, or bone and stuff it.
Hmm. Digestive juices flowing now. Time for some breakfast!
If you don’t like turkey because it doesn’t have enough fat, what you want is turducken. It’s only four hours’ work to prepare it (most of which is boning the three birds) and six to eight hours to cook, and it’ll feed several dozen people. Why wouldn’t you do it?
Years ago on Daily Pundit, the late Chef Mojo said he used to know a Japanese chef who could bone a chicken in under a minute but he had to be drunk to do it. Me being me, I said that I’d have to be really drunk to bone a chicken, and the conversation was kind of derailed.
I might give that a go sometime for a party. The duck would certainly baste the chicken and the turkey. On the other hand, I would probably just go directly for the duck (or a goose).
It’s not so much the low-fat-ness of chicken and, especially, turkey that I don’t like, it’s more that they are kind of dull lumps of amorphous protein. A bit like non-vegetarian tofu.
I always have the impression that they (especially the white meat) are meat for people who don’t really like meat. That’s just me, though.
Goodness, the turkey hangovers must be worse than I thought, only SteveF is up! Or are you all just online doing your Black Friday shopping?
Java is wordy, but my concern in an academic situation would be the abstraction with generated SQL and JPA isolating the students from the nitty gritty of typing “scott/tiger” and constructing the syntax for complex database queries themselves, learning the “why” of higher normal form DB architecture.
I’ve seen the end result in the field. My lead was so clueless about making inquiries into our SQLite configuration database file that he used a hex dump program to check values in the entries relevant to our component up until I suggested “sqlite3 file.db .dump > file.sql”.
Instead of creating a new table for job control on our process, he simply inserted columns into our existing table. Third normal form? Fuggedaboudit.
I learned this past week that the next pay grade above me is about $40k/year more than I make.
The secret is to bang the rocks together guys.
A turducken is a lot of work and the tradition is that preparation becomes a shared social experience at the gathering, with at least three people involved in the prep.
Most Americans miss that part.
Yes, but: my goal here is to dissect the frameworks. So many students say “I’ll just use Spring Boot”. Which is great, but they see it as a magical tool and have zero clue what it does or how it works. So I’ve spent a couple of weeks showing them how one could build a framework like that: Service endpoints (using HttpHandler), JPA queries (this little DB framework), and so forth. Honestly, it’s all shockingly easy.
Take the magic out of it, and maybe (just maybe) persuade them that a few hundred lines of DIY code can be better than importing huge masses of other people’s code.
I believe it. The last time I worked in the industry, the database “expert” needed to store more info in an existing database. He took a string field, and put CSV data into it. Multiple values in a single field, so not even 1st normal form. Unbelievable.
Thanksgiving in Atlanta. Went to Microcenter on Wednesday to pick up two monitors my kid wants for Christmas. Monitors have really come down in price. 2560×114, 180HZ, 27″ 1MS response, for $158.00. I found the price dropped $10.00 for Black Friday but I am not going back to Microcenter to save $20.00. Experience has taught me the line snakes through the store and the average wait in line is almost an hour.
I did find one other item I wanted. A Dymo address label printer for $36.00 off. I ordered it, it will be delivered. There used to be a company, Walter Drake I think, where you could order rolls of return address labels. I ordered three rolls probably 25 years ago and have finally run out of labels. I can print labels using label sheets. That costs as much as printing the Dymo label machine.
https://www.staples.com/dymo-labelwriter-550-desktop-label-printer-2112552/product_24499871
I used these at TBP when I was working. I bought one and everyone liked it so well the organization bought eight more. Very handy for an organization that does a lot of mailing and the addresses are available on the screen. A simple copy and paste and the label is printed with POSTNET barcode.
I do miss the days of getting the 2″ thick Atlanta paper on Thursday morning, spending part of the day going through the sale pages, planning and plotting the shopping on Friday. The women went their own way, the men went another way. The women would get up at 4:30 for the door buster sales at 5:00. It was good times indeed.
I have found the Atlanta paper will cease printing at the end of the year. No more physical media, everything online. The end of an era. A lot of kids made spending money delivering papers on a paper route. That is gone forever.
What I saw in Atlanta in September that shocked me was the Death Star logo missing from the legacy BellSouth building in Midtown.
The Varsity hasn’t changed, however, which was the destination that afternoon.
Don’t forget to stop at World of CocaCola for a little Beverly soda before you leave.
In another year, a monitor that size won’t sell without a USB-C dock capability built in along with a couple of ports.
Apple has a MacBook coming based on the A18 chip to compete with Chromebooks, and, to preserve margins, the rumored price will be at least $600. The tradeoff, in addition to the machine being a general purpose Unix system, will be a USB-C dock capability which most Chromebooks lack.
Sometimes, sometimes not.
The anti-framework case is obvious: megabytes of code being brought in with only a few percent of it being needed. Uncertainty of just what-all is going on under the hood. Reliance on someone else not breaking things.
The pro-framework case is largely that developer time is valuable. Not only the developer who writes the functionality which is just what is needed but the developers who have to use or maintain that code. A framework like Spring Boot is broadly known and has mountains of tutorials and cookbook code, which custom will not. There’s a good chance that whatever developer sat down to write only what’s needed isn’t all that good and edge cases will be handled with meaningless error messages if at all. Product requirements commonly grow and you might find yourself needed 10% of the framework’s capability rather than 3%, versus rewriting and re-rewriting the custom code, versus kludging and rekludging the custom code.
As a team lead or architect, I’d want to have an idea of how stable the product is likely to be and how stable the development team staffing is likely to be, before deciding one way or the other.
My favorite bit of relational database wizardry was a schema which had loops in the dependencies: TableA had a foreign key constraint on TableB, which had a FK constraint on TableC, which had a FK constraint on TableA. In a schema of about 30 tables, IIRC there were about four loops. Worse, one was a loop within a loop. The outgoing architect, and you may infer as many sneer quotes as you like, who designed this masterpiece solemnly informed me that the constraints had to be disabled because Oracle had a bug, so all consistency checking had to be done in the Java code.
When I took over the project (because the former guy chose to take a new position, a couple weeks before this project was to be delivered, but don’t worry, it’s 99% done and just needs a little cleanup and documentation – riiiiiight) and began to comprehend its full glory, I printed out the schema and showed it to the manager who was supposedly keeping everything on course and on time. He just shook his head. I then told him how I was unable to put any primary keys on the tables or put in foreign key constraints because the tables had duplicates and orphans and who knows what. I then showed him the project specs and checked off all of the things that the “99% done” program didn’t do, despite the specs being very brief and high-level and mostly a list of “we would like it to” items rather than actual specifications. Bottom line, no, this isn’t going to be released in two weeks. It needs to be redone from scratch.
The former “senior consultant” architect and developer was brought in from one of the big-name consulting companies. The state agency was probably paying close to $400/hr (in today’s money) for him to have accomplished nothing in a year. And, in case anyone was curious, he was from the subcontinent.
Been there, done that, more than once. All the exchange students wanted to go to the place. Their favorite was the numerous dispensers with various beverages produced (or is it bottled) by Coke. A couple of the beverages were quite disgusting.
I remember an interview done by the local Atlanta TV station where the reporter asked “What do you think about McDonald’s claim of selling millions of hamburgers?” The manager responded with “Hell, we’ve thrown away that many”.
Get in line for the hamburger. Get in another line for the fries. Get in another line for the drink. Get in another line for the milkshake. If you are in the wrong line whoa be unto the individual who orders fries in the drink line. Part of the “charm” I guess.
I have heard that rumor from many sources. It should be good machine suitable for many people. However, the price becomes an issue. I can get a MacBook Air M4 for about $150.00 above your price point. Probably with a better display. For $600 there had better be some serious features to really compete with the MacBook Air. Walmart has the M1 Air for $549.00, $51.00 less then your price point.
The M1 Air was a well performing machine. The biggest downside was the lack of ports. Two USB-C ports, one needed for charging, is quite limiting.
The A18 chip is supposed to perform much better than the M1. People that buy the M1 are not really stressing that processor so the A18 would be overkill. Reading email, browsing the web, Pages, Numbers, etc. run quite well on the M1 so would do just as well on the A18.
I have not heard about that capability from all the rumor mills. If Apple provides four additional ports beyond the power port, that would be an interesting capability. Maybe could even use the machine as a second display for an existing MacBook,
Regardless, I think the $600 price point is too high. I think the price point needs to get around $400.00, maybe $399.00 to confuse the clueless, before such a machine would be a viable product.
We saw the latest “Knives Out” movie last night.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hc8yz5-d5Y
@Jenny – This should be in theaters even in your part of the country this weekend.
If you’re debating whether it would be safe for the kid, the trailer above shows everything that makes the movie PG-13 except the large amount of masturbation innuendo from Josh Brolin early in the film.
Beverly is an acquired taste.
Ordered turducken prepared by a New Orleans chef about ten years ago. Underwhelming and the cost was high for the result.
Thaw the turkey completely. Know your oven temperature (you have profiled it yourself?). Use a cooking cycle appropriate for the size of the bird. Use an oven cooking bag. Make your stuffing on the stove top. Probe the temp with an instant read thermometer and shut the oven off before teaching the target temp–the turkey will keep cooking. Slice the breast, immediately baste it, and cover with foil until served.
A pre-basted turkey breast rather than a whole turkey is a good option for smaller gatherings.
Always have butter on hand. The correct use measurement is “stick of butter”. Half a stick in the stuffing, half a stick in the potatoes before whipping with cream, and half a stick per person so they have enough for topping potatoes and buttering rolls. Actually, each plate should be prepped with butter before loading, just to be sure.
Yeah, they tend to gravitate towards database work even though they all tend to parrot the line about wanting to be “full stack” developers.
I don’t think they understand what that means. Even their career goals are plagiarized.
My former lead just went to work for Oracle. She became a manager for my current employer three years ago, but she was so useless in that role that the company demoted her to “Individual Contributor” earlier this year.
Good riddance.
Achtung! Feind hört mit!
Obviously, big internet is reading us. Hardly had I mentioned the Thanksgiving bird, but YT suggested this; Will from Fallow preparing a turkey crown with boned and rolled legs. It looks decent, though if I went to that much trouble anyway with the preparation, I would bone it out completely.
https://youtu.be/cFrduFR70pw
I like the marmelade glaze idea for the legs, but I wouldn’t put English mustard in it. As Pierre Hoffmann rightly says, English mustard should not be permitted in kitchens.
I don’t use butter on my green beans. I cut a pound of bacon into 1″ chunks, stir fry until crisp, shut the heat off, tilt the pan for two minutes to let the fat drain, then remove the bacon to a paper towel lined dish.
Remove all but two tablespoons of the bacon fat with a spoon. Add one pound green beans. Return to heat and stir fry until al dente. Turn the heat off. Return the remaining (after taste testing) 12 ounces of bacon to the pan. Cover until serving.
“English mustard should not be permitted in kitchens.”
No. Best applied to the beaches to repel the French.
I had a paper route when I was in 6th (maybe?) grade. I know it was middle school and might have been 7th grade. I had roughly 60 houses on my route that covered a couple miles overall. It was a 5 minute walk from my house to the paper pickup/start of the route. I would use my bike and it was manageable most days, though Wednesdays were tough – sometimes I had to split up the load as the papers were thick. Sundays were definitely a split load. Mom would sometimes take pity on me and drive me around on Sundays.
What was a racket about paper delivery was the finances. The paper carrier was responsible for paying the newspaper for the papers they dropped off. Every two weeks if I remember. The carrier did all the money collecting. If people weren’t home or avoided you (I had a couple that did that), then tough. You still had to pay the newspaper. A guy from the paper would camp out in his pos car in a church parking lot and all the local carriers would show up to pay. I remember the car smelling like a big cigarette.
That job did teach me one very important lesson. Never, ever finance anything with your money for the company you work for. If it’s needed for the job, the company can buy it. No exceptions. I also don’t use company sponsored credit cards tied to me personally. Luckily, I don’t travel for work so that makes it easy.
Apple probably has a surplus of A18 SoC modules which they need to unload. Might as well make some money.
And “architect” and “team lead” and other roles without quantifiable performance metrics. Regardless of the role, there’s an awful lot of over promise, under deliver.
This guy was supposed to have done the entire application, a database-backed data entry and report generation tool for a state agency. He had a year to do it, which I think included gathering requirements. (To be fair, that probably took quite a while. This was for NYS Department of Education and the vast majority of the employees were idiots, even by the low standards applied to state employees.) He produced nothing but a partially-working proof of concept, not even good enough to show first-round VC investors. In the five months I was there, I needed most of one to get past that guy’s line of BS and realize how bad the product was and to persuade the managers that it wasn’t fixable and needed a redo. It took me about two months to do the product from the ground up, and the final two months to train the users, make a few feature changes (there were very few coding defects; almost all problems came from the requirements being wrong), and train the state employees who would take over maintenance. (One of them was capable but spent so little time in the IT department’s area that I thought he was a part-timer. The other was so useless that she couldn’t fix a typo she’d made when I told her the file name and the line number. My tax dollars at work.)
Texas Draws a Line on Roads and Rules
https://redstate.com/brad-essex/2025/11/28/the-essex-files-texas-draws-a-line-on-roads-and-rules-n2196611
I would wager the MacBook “Lite” (my term) may have the A19 SoC rather than the A18 due to the underwhelming, almost failure, of the iPhone Air. Or the MacBook Lite is already so far along in production using the A18 that my thinking is warped. Maybe Apple will reserve the A19 for the MacBook Lite Pro. The wonders of marketing.
Quoted for truth.
I suspect that people who get caught up in MLM schemes and authors and artists who pay for “professional services” never walked a paper route.
When I was in the Army and travelling constantly for one posting, we all were required to get special credit cards through some connected bank. The cards were in our names but DOD would make the payments directly. Sometimes in full and sometimes on time. We individuals were responsible for any late fees or interest. (I did kind of wonder who got the kickback for this little deal.) And the limit was low, enough for the needs of most of the people, who were on the road a week or so per month. Nowhere near enough for me, who was on the road three or more weeks per month. (I was gone so much that some of the other lieutenants in the bachelor officers’ quarters were surprised to find that my room wasn’t vacant.) I stopped using the government credit card and just used my own, which got me bitched at by the director of the lab, a Special Executive Service buttwipe who was supposed to be equivalent to a general. (One of three times he bitched at me in a year and a half. The others were for breaking into the SCIF when the night guard was asleep at a desk and the other was for telling the truth during an investigation, when I had been instructed to stonewall.)
Yes, Trump Just Called Tim Walz This…and It’s Very Much Appropriate
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2025/11/28/yes-trump-just-called-tim-walz-thisand-its-very-much-appropriate-n2667123
Which made him a great pick for Kankles, and makes him look like a genius standing next to the doorknob U.S Senators from MN.
Reading Black Friday tales on NotAlwaysRight makes me grateful that I never did that. I did once make the mistake of going to a mall the day before Christmas. That was crazy enough. I really, really hate crowds…
Black Friday has infected stores here, especially online stores, bit the discounts are pretty minor: 10% or 20%. Nothing to get excited about…
Welcome to Friday of Color, everything you see here is discounted far below its true worth!
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It’s a bit chilly but sunny. I didn’t glance at the thermometer though. I don’t think it’s still 50F.
Had my gratton du porc on toasted english muffins with butter and salt for breakfast. Coffee is almost gone.
Y’all have been chatty this morning.
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I had a paper route. Pretty big one. I “bought” it from my buddy Dean in 5th or 6th grade, buying all the past due accounts too. Some of those accounts were still unpaid years later when I sold the route to the next kid. Three big paperboy bags were needed to carry the whole route. I used a sled in winter, wearing a full snowmobile suit and balaclava. Still froze. The bundles of papers would get dropped in the street near my house and I’d have to add the circulars and roll each paper and add the rubber band.
Collecting from people was nuts. They’d come to the door in an open robe. The apartments stunk like boiled cabbage. They’d dodge a 14yo kid over $2. Some would try to fake the punched holes in their payment book, but we had special punches, not round ones. It was a good lesson in work and people.
————
The details of the DB stuff are above my level, but hearing that state employees and contractors/developers are incompetent is pretty much what I expect.
Just look at some of the boondoggles around obabbbmycare.
————
Time to start my day.
n
Oh, forgot to add, my first year with Bigcorp, I was on the road about 200 days, and I ran $90K thru my personal AMEX card.
It was a gift card Christmas!
———————————-
https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/income-needed-join-top-1-every-state
interesting
n
The MacBook (without Pro or Air) model name is available.
The last MacBook was an underpowered machine but Apple kept the price point high to avoid cannibalizing the sales of the Air at the time.
I don’t think Apple is ready to declair the iPhone Air to be a failure yet.
Regardless of which SoC Apple uses, I think someone at Apple saw a previous version of this presentation where Kernigan expresses frustration about not being able to tap the power of the Unix device that is his phone for more general purpose tasks.
This can’t be the first time Kernigan ever expressed that frustration.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEb_YL1K1Qg
Oracle’s consulting division was thoroughly discredited with the Cover Oregon marketplace meltdown.
I don’t think the company has ever recovered, but now they’ve tied their fortunes to the Monkey Trick and the financial circle jerk that keeps the stock market from crashing.
A reminder of the Obamacare boondoggle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6HMDFXA50o
On the interwebz, fiascos live forever.
Want a conspiracy theory? Laura Gibson eventually moved to New York City to escape the fallout from making those Cover Oregon commercials, and she narrowly escaped death one night when her apartment mysteriously blew up.
You forgot to mention lazy and dishonest.
When I mentioned to my dad that I’d taken a contract (through a small, local consulting company) with DeptEd, he groaned and warned me to expect bigger idiots than I’ve ever dealt with before, with bigger egos than I’ve ever dealt with before. Most of his clients as a financial advisor and stock trade handler (? whatever it’s called; before the days of online trading by individuals) and a couple other related, licensed fields were public school teachers and other school employees, notably including quite a few with doctorates in education. I thought that he was exaggerating. Nope. If anything, he understated the problem.
This was very much true when I was in the USAF and the units had civilian GS type employees. Most were incompetent and were in the role assigned because they were dumped from previous and just relocated as firing them was too tedious.
After I had been in the service 5 months I was sent to advanced programming school. There were 12 of us in the class. One was an E-6 tech sergeant who was cross training from flight line tractor jockey before he retired so he could get a job. There was me, an E-2, airman 1st class designation at the time.
The other 10 were civilians. Of all the people in the two week class I was the top of the heap, better than anyone. The civilians had been in the programming role for 10 years or more and were mostly clueless, certainly in over their heads. The E-6 was just sat there with glazed eyes as he did not know much about anything other than getting drunk each night.
The only person that finished the assignments was me. I even found a mistake the instructor, a civilian, which did not go over well.
When I was at Randolph, working on the base level personnel system, the two civilians out of the 12 man office, were basically left alone to do paper shuffling, right documentation, as their programming skills were horrible. Especially for GS-11 people.
Happy Black Friday (and a belated Happy Thanksgiving) to all the “inhabitants” of this cozy corner of virtual space (and of course thanks to Al G.)
My refuge from this crazy world we live in – helps keep me sane on those gray days.
Now to see what goodies I can buy that I really don’t need 🙂
write documentation. gggaaaccckkk.
The rumor is next year’s iPad Mini 8 will have the A19P or possibly the A20P depending on development. The real big news is an OLED screen on the Mini. I’ll upgrade for that.
I remember when the military issued everybody a Diners Club card for travel. It was a disaster because “hey, free money”. There were so many in trouble (including officers), that the program was dropped.
Friday. Time for bed, as I will have an early start in the morning – another outing with a rifle.
After my chilly experience yesterday, I jumped on the Friday of Colour discount train at Big River and ordered a heated waistcoat, a Varta powerbank and heated socks. I wonder if they will arrive before the end of the season… and if they will fit. The clothing looks Made in China, and the sizing for svelte east Asians is not the sizing for rotund northern Europeans.
I hooked my Brother all in one printer/scanner-fax device to the local network, and my Linux Mint box can see it and and print to it even without my having installed Brother’s Linux drivers. That’s a good thing, because for whatever reason, the “SU” command is not accepting this machine’s password, and I need to SU before I can run the BASH script to install the Brother files. Hrumph.
Goodnight!
We had a weird incident today.
Living in a mountain village, we often don’t lock our doors. My wife drove me to the train station, and when she came back, an outside door was open.
Hmmm…maybe just not latched? But we hadn’t used the door today, so that seems unlikely.
The dog was home, and he’s not friendly to strangers, so I doubt anyone came in. More likely, opened the door, heard barking, and left in a hurry. But…who would try to come in? The crazy neighbors ? They’re narcissists, not idiots. Some kid? Just seems unlikely.
Anyway, I’ve been looking at small, discreet security cameras. The problem: it’s not clear which ones will save to a local NAS, as opposed to a stick or the cloud. Any suggestions?
Eufy cameras. Wireless, solar powered, stores on camera or to a central control module.
Maybe it wasn’t quite solidly latched and the wind opened it?
They do exist. We had one which took an internal hard drive and had connectors for keyboard, mouse, HDMI, and four wired cameras. Probably search for “drive” or “local” in the product title or description. I won’t recommend any brand because ours was Chinesium and died after less than two years.
Yeah, my first thought was wind. But…we hadn’t used that door for a day or so – seems like it would have come open earlier? But that does remain the most likely explanation.
Hey, I’m still surprised the dog didn’t take himself for a walk.
I don’t think the cards we got were Diners Club but am not sure. This was in 1986 or 7. I thought that it was just for our group (an R&D lab under the Communications-Electronics Command), but I may be remembering wrong or have misunderstood in the first place. IIRC the Green Berets I worked with didn’t have anything like it but had their own payment methods for when they were in the field – it came up in conversation because I’d been sent out with about $50 in local currency, no other payment method, and a “miscommunication” about how I was to meet up with the team. (I got it worked out. Being able to work out that sort of thing was probably why I was sent to Turdholiad with essentially no preparation. It’s also probably why the team captain and master sergeant recommended me for Special Forces Selection.)
I’ll second Eufy cameras. I have four solar outdoor Eufy’s in SA. One is a PTZ turret on the garage. One doorbell cam and an indoor PTZ.
The aviation units I was in kept several “goobermint” CC’s for checkout when on cross country missions. Used for refueling aircraft and goobermint cars checked out from the motor pool.
The Diners Club cards were replaced by American Express cards for a while. It was another disaster of “free money”. Give somebody a CC with no restrictions and they’ll use it.
“Commitment isn’t a chore. It is a challenge.”
– Solomon Short
I have stuff in my Wish List on Big River. Some is tagged “Black Friday Deal” but that’s not true when the price today is the same as it was Tuesday. So much for “stocking up”.
No biggie. I’ll buy when I actually need.
When I worked for the bank holding company in San Antonio we ran disaster preparedness tests. Travel to Pennsylvania to a remote site. During one of the early tests it was discovered that many people that needed to travel did not have enough cash, or credit limits, to buy an airline ticket. Of course they would be reimbursed.
The holding company’s solution was a couple of credit cards in widely separated and different secure locations that could be accessed any time by a select few individuals. The credit cards had no spending limits. Reasonable since the bank owned the card.
One of my buddies was VP of Marketing for a trendy apparel company during the go go years. The company issued him an AMEX Black – no limit and a personal staffer on call.
During an annual review, the CEO and Finance guys got bent out of shape that he had the card and they didn’t. He pointed out that he routinely used it for $1M+ bills at trade shows, and they didn’t. They backed off.
He got screwed on options though when the value of the stock crashed and the IRS still wanted tax on the old value… I don’t remember the details but it was like the AMT as it’s a trap for some potentially highly compensated individuals.
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Did a trash run, picked up one item. The other pickup location was closed. I don’t know how they stay open frankly. Subcontinent money laundering probably.
Time for one more trip to the shop with stuff from the house.
n
I got screwed on the valuation of stock options of a failed company, too. My income tax bill was about 30% higher one year because of my uncashed stock options which were worth nothing when I did my taxes. Very annoying.
On the same military assignment as I mentioned above, the DOD civilians who traveled regularly were able to claim the frequent flyer miles and upgrade their seats. I wasn’t eligible because I was military and the flights came under a different contract even when they were the same airline, arranged by the same travel office. Anyway, on one flight, the same director as mentioned above was sitting in economy class on a cross-country flight while one of the peons was in first class. This will not do! Never mind that that peon had been flying to one of the vendor sites a week every month for a couple years while the director traveled a couple times per year. The director mandated that all frequent flyer points must be assigned to the office for assignment as appropriate. Everyone knew what that meant, so the DOD civilians refused to put in for the miles. Let that fat buttmuncher get the upgrade that they earned? This will not do. So the only result was that the director screwed the frequent travelers out of one of the few perqs they’d been getting, to nobody’s benefit. What a buttmuncher.
When I traveled under a contract with Department of Energy, no one was allowed to use their miles. Any miles had to be turned into the travel office. Even tickets purchased with my own credit card and expensed.
It got even worse. I needed to go to a conference that started on Monday, ended on Friday. In California. I asked if I could fly out on Friday before, spend two days with my mother, no charged expenses other than the flight ticket, and no per diem until Sunday night. The price of the ticket dropped from $1,400 to $700. A good deal I thought.
But no, can’t do that. I was taking a vacation at government expense. I explained I was flying to California, whether I took two days of my own time, or arrived on Sunday, I was still going to California. And I was saving the contract $700 in the process. My request was denied.
So I flew on Sunday, bought the ticket on Sunday, making the ticket price now $1,900. All perfectly legal.
On another convention trip the hotel that hosted the convention was $5.00 over the allowance that DOE would pay. I had to stay at a hotel one block away that cost $10.00 less than the convention hotel. Because I was not staying in the convention hotel I was allowed to rent a car at $45.00 a day for five days. And pay $20.00 a day in parking at the non-convention hotel for five days of parking. $65.00 a day more because DOE would not authorize the additional $5.00.
Another time I was going to spend the Friday night before returning home on Saturday at a relative’s house. I was informed by the travel office if there was no hotel bill for that Friday night the entire trip would be at my expense because the timing of the trip would not match my hotel stays. So another $130.00 for a night in a hotel, and meals, that would have been zero cost otherwise.
This was necessary because some losers working on contracts abused the travel. DOE had to lock it down, no exceptions to travel rules.
After those three events I gave up trying to save money while traveling on the contract. I maxed out my per diem, took the most expensive coach flights. I just didn’t care because trying to save money, albeit with a benefit to me, was not allowed because I was “cheating the system”.
>>I did find one other item I wanted. A Dymo address label printer for $36.00 off. I ordered it, it will be delivered. There used to be a company, Walter Drake I think, where you could order rolls of return address labels. I ordered three rolls probably 25 years ago and have finally run out of labels. I can print labels using label sheets. That costs as much as printing the Dymo label machine.
https://www.staples.com/dymo-labelwriter-550-desktop-label-printer-2112552/product_24499871
I used these at TBP when I was working. I bought one and everyone liked it so well the organization bought eight more. Very handy for an organization that does a lot of mailing and the addresses are available on the screen. A simple copy and paste and the label is printed with POSTNET barcode.
@Ray, last I looked at the Dymo 550 label printer they had implmented a DRM scheme to force the use of only Dymo’s labels. Kinda sux as they seem to have the label printer market cornered…but I won’t spend a dime with any company that has DRM.
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/reviews/dymo-550-thermal-printer-drm-hacking/
>>Well, the dead camera is dead. B&H has a very nice Speco Technologies camera on sale, limit 2, free shipping. The camera is very capable and massively discounted.
Speco Technologies O8T1MG 8MP Outdoor Network Turret Camera with Night Vision & 2.8-12mm Lens
I can’t link because their store knows I already bought my two.
I’m boycotting B&H until they get rid of the super-annoying “Press & Hold” captcha.
I found a cheaper source for the labels, they are Dymo. I am not too concerned. The cost per label is on par with Avery sheet labels. And I don’t have to deal with using partial sheets. Based on the number of labels that I will use the hassle of using non-Dymo labels is not a concern.
I can find cheaper cartridges for my Brother color laser. Based on a support call for a busted fuser roller, under warranty, serial numbers of the toner cartridges and the imaging roller are verified. Non-Brother cartridges and the printer is marked for no support.
It is not worth the risk for me.
Aren’t all captcha’s annoying? Click on bicycles, busses, traffic signs. Is that pole really part of the traffic light that is strung on the cable? I guess so because now I get a captcha of a bus. Is that part of the bus or a bumper of another car. I guess a car because now I get another captcha of bicycles.
At that same Army posting, when the testing of the surveillance aircraft ramped up and the DOD office was going to have at least two people in Silicon Valley nonstop for the next six months, I looked at the projected hotel bill, then found an apartment which would be delighted to accept checks from the DOD and could arrange for daily maid service. This came very close to replicating the hotel experience, the only difference being having to cross the street to a bar instead of just taking the elevator to the first floor. Price for the 2BR apartment plus cleaning would be about a third of the price of two hotel rooms.
The effort failed. Different buckets of money. No way to shift money from bucket to bucket.
So then I talked with the management of the main hotel we used and arranged for a 10% discount for the next six months, tentative pending confirmation from the travel office people.
That confirmation never came. I couldn’t find any reason for this. The only thing I could think of was that the DOD civilians couldn’t be bothered to make a phone call and write a letter.
The only good that came out of these messes was that I impressed the hell out of my boss, a Major, and I got a “walks on water” annual review. (Which somewhat balanced out the “should be considered for early separation from active duty” review I got when assigned to an infantry battalion in Korea. I’d gotten a very good annual review from my direct boss, a Captain, but the battalion commander said “That son of a bitch ain’t that good. Write another one.” The LTC couldn’t stand me, for no reason that anyone ever relayed to me. The order to redo the OER was illegal, but the Captain had as much backbone as the typical jellyfish and screwed me over.)
I did manage to save time and money for the military and/or some of the vendors on this one big project. Just by being on site all day, every day, and walking around and talking to everyone from the chief scientist to the forklift operators, I spotted a number of problems which would have caused delays or losses. The biggest was an almost oops with the big power lines feeding the big computers (each of which was the size of a couple of household refrigerators and probably had the compute power of an iPhone 5), which would have destroyed or at least damaged the computers and caused a delay of months or years. Most of the things I spotted involved integration between the many vendors (each in the state of a senator who’d been in office longer than I’d been alive). They were smaller but they add up.
Well, I got hit by a car on my way home. Guy ran the red light, I saw him but couldn’t stop or get around him. He hit my driver rear wheel and spun me 180. No visible damage to my truck, other than scratches on the rim, but his whole front clip is damaged, and everything in front of the hood is destroyed. Little shitbox sedan.
Guy looked upper middle class, his english was pretty good. Neither of our dash cams was working. He knew he ran the light and was at fault. He has some sort of temporary liability only card, so I don’t think there will be any insurance money. My neck is feeling a little stiff, but it was stiff before the accident.
I’ll have my car guy throw the truck on the rack and check the alignment. worst case is some driveline damage or misalignment. Crazy that there isn’t any sheet metal damage.
I got pictures and there was a witness who volunteered his number, said he was behind the guy and couldn’t believe he ran the light.
Oh well, I’ve got an ice pad on my shoulders and I’ll take a muscle relaxer before bed.
New dashcam gets installed tomorrow, if it’s not raining.
Today was a windy, blustery day.
n
@nick, sorry to hear about your incident, glad that no one was hurt. Sheet metal can usually be fixed easier than flesh and bone. Stay safe…
>>I found a cheaper source for the labels, they are Dymo. I am not too concerned. The cost per label is on par with Avery sheet labels. And I don’t have to deal with using partial sheets. Based on the number of labels that I will use the hassle of using non-Dymo labels is not a concern.
All well and good if the Dymo solution meets your need…me, I won’t spend a dime with Brother, Dymo, John Deere, and any other company that treats its customers like crooks.
I’ve got all kinds of travel stories like those.
Guys in the middle east office were flying First Class on every flight, even ½ hour short hops, so then nobody could fly First, or even Business without an exception, even on 14 hour international travel, and even if the customer’s policy was to have their guys fly business on those flights.
Then people were paying more for direct flights, in order to get to the customer sooner (because we were install and field service staff, and customers don’t like to be down) but the office didn’t like that. So they instituted a rule that you had to take an alternate route with stops if one was available and cost at least $50 less. Even if the flight time was 12 hours vs 4, you had to take the flight with stops. So the company lost a whole day of work to travel, instead of getting someone on site immediately. The added bonus was that people started booking multi-leg trips to maximize their points toward premier status… The opposite of what most companies want.
One of the last changes before I quit was to require us to travel on weekends so we could be on site 9-5 during the week. F that noise. We were already working 12-14 a day or more, and barely had enough time at home to kiss our wives and do laundry.
No way would the engineering or office staff have worked 6 hours on a weekend without pay, every weekend, both Sat and Sun… and 40 during the week. No overtime, no official comp time. And good luck finding time to take your unofficial comp time. Or getting paid for it when you separated.
n
Bah.
Well, hope you’re ok, or at least ok-ish.
Double bah. “Two is one and one is none” bites again.
I put a recording dash/rear cam in my daughter’s car. I’ve planned to put one each in my wife’s and my cars, when I get to it. I’m now wondering if I have enough to put a second cam in each. My wife collected a bunch of them, in different styles and qualities.
Did you get that recorded, at least?
Does that suggest anything regarding driving record, legitimacy of his driver’s license, or anything? Or does it simply signify a personal choice to take on a higher level of risk himself?
I think he’s probably not a resident or green card holder. I suspect he’ll evaporate if I need him. His name matched the paperwork though.
——–
I might need to file an uninsured motorist claim. I’ll talk to my insurance on Monday.
——–
Wrt dashcams, the market is flooded with chinese cams with throwaway brand names. Some years ago, the Black Box line was recommended here and elsewhere.
I’ve got enough china ones to put one in every vehicle but only did mine so far. That will happen tomorrow, and maybe the GPS trackers too.
———–
Even though it’s chilly, I think I might go out early for my tiny little fire and book, then I can get to bed early, and get up early tomorrow.
It certainly feels later than it is.
n
Ugh. When I got hit several years back in El Paso, the other guy, truck owner, had some shady insurance. The guy barely spoke English. He was clearly at fault, but two calls to El Paso’s finest resulted in no cop showing up. We exchanged insurance. Two days later I get a call from his shady insurance trying to tell me I was at fault. I hung up and called USAA and told them about it. They said I wound never hear from them again. I didn’t. I don’t know if USAA got money from shady insurance or they just paid up front for my repairs.
USAA isn’t the cheapest insurance, but I’ve been with them for 46 years.
Yah. I’ve been up since midnight. I went to bed early last night because I had been sleeping little for several weeks and didn’t have anything pressing, probably fell asleep moments after my head hit the pillow … and was woken not long after. It gets wearisome, after the first few months.
I think he’s probably not a resident or green card holder. I suspect he’ll evaporate if I need him. His name matched the paperwork though.
Glad you are mostly OK and your Ranger is mostly OK.
At least he did not pull that “no habla englis” on you. My middle brother got into an accident in Houston about 30 years ago where a Vietnamese guy ran a red light and tboned his Jetta. They were talking about it and the cop showed up and all of a sudden the Vietnamese guy could not speak English and refused to take responsibility.
I would turn it over to my insurance company as no insurance and let them fight it out.
On Dymo:
I’ve used Dymo’s for years. They are very versatile with lots of label formats. I‘ve even had the double that would print an address label and postage at the same time (subscription for postage, but the special labels were cheap). About a year and a half ago, the last Dymo gave up the ghost. Most of our printing is now shipping labels. I purchased the wireless Rollo thermal. It’ll take generic labels and Amazon had a deal on a thousand sheet stack (the Rollo feeds from a folded stack like a dot-matrix rather than rolls). I use Pirate Ship. The combo works out great.
USAA isn’t the cheapest insurance, but I’ve been with them for 46 years.
I have been with Amica for 41 years. It is more important for me to have somebody that will stand behind me than saving a few bucks.
“Branco Cartoon – Operation Sedition”
https://comicallyincorrect.com/branco-cartoon-operation-sedition/
“A.F. Branco Cartoon – Senator Mark Kelly and the other Seditious officials knew that they were purposely trying to subvert the Commander-in-Chief to create discord and doubt within the military ranks. This was a pure political stunt that put our service members and the country in danger.”
Mark Kelly is a bad man and a threat to our nation.
Stay away from dumbrocrats, they are dangerous.
Regarding @Nick’s accident – remember that you probably have a camera function on your phone that does stills and videos. Use it to take pictures of everything – damage and drivers and witnesses. Have the witnesses send you a text so you will have their number for later. Take a picture of the other drivers and passengers. Take pictures of the damage on both vehicles. Use the video function to record a movie of the discussion and damage and participants. Take pictures of the insurance cards and drivers licenses and/or IDs.
You might not need all of that, but the video/picture documentation might prove useful at a later time to bolster your memory of the incident.
Practice ahead of time on how to quickly get into the camera app and start/stop videos.
Options or RSUs?
My employer gives RSUs, and the grants are taxed as regular income at the time of vesting, when the shares hit the account at Fidelity.
Mr. Lynn: Is you a-watching dem der Aggies? It is becoming a game.
More reasons that the “exempt” tag is long overdue for an overhaul.
@greg, would you bid on a signed photo/poster of Tom Baker/Dr Who with a COA from Arsenal Models? How about Peter Capaldi? Tom Baker is my favorite Dr…
There’s a David Tennant including cast members too.
A very cursory search doesn’t tell me much.
n
More reasons that the “exempt” tag is long overdue for an overhaul.
– absolutely. My employer abused it egregiously. I was much happier in the entertainment industry with a day rate and negotiated overtime and penalties.
n
Had a nice tiny little fire, and fired up the Solo Stove when the propane ran out for my MrHeaters… I’ll have to spend some time refilling bottles tomorrow, or dig out the extension hose and filters to use a BBQ bottle.
Solo stove lights very well, and burns with a good heat. Not quite as nice as the mini chiminea that I used to use, but a nice way to have a fire in a suburban neighborhood.
No critters tonight, although I had a tiny little squirrel chowing down on acorns right next to my pond during the day yesterday. Cute little guy and not very concerned I was standing right there. Same size as the one the cat savaged only front yard instead of back.
n
Mr. Lynn: Is you a-watching dem der Aggies? It is becoming a game.
It was a game. Sarkisian did a excellent job with his defense and got his quarterback settled down in the second half.
Time for a shower and bed, but D1 beat me to it. She finished an extended shift in her new mall store retail job today, and I bet needs to get the stink off herself.
She says she enjoyed it. She’s still new…
n
Sorry to hear about your accident, Nick. I hope you are as well as can be, that the vehicle damage is not serious, and that the other party turns out to be properly insured.
Saturday. Dark. Time to get up and ready to chase Bambi.
Argh. Minor prepping fail. I wanted to have hot porridge for breakfast, but don’t have enough oats in the kitchen.
https://www.flahavans.ie/product/flahavans-progress-oatlets/
I probably have more in the cellar, but don’t have time now to go looking. Müsli with cold milk it is …
“If the BBC Never Questions Net Zero the Journalists Might as Well be Replaced by ChatGPT”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/11/28/if-the-bbc-never-questions-net-zero-the-journalists-might-as-well-be-replaced-by-chatgpt/
“Opinions may differ, but suitably prompted AI could easily replicate much of the climate output of the BBC over the last two decades.”
You know, since 99% of journalists are woke, ChatGPT could not do a worse job.
A bowl of mucilage? Ewww…
(Yes, I’m awake at 0221. No, I’m not happy about it.)
Looking at Eufy cameras. It’s not clear in the specs in the shop, which ones will play nice with an NAS. Maybe I need to go to the company site. I don’t want to fiddle with memory sticks, or pay for some random cloud service.
More research needed.