I guess I’ll see how cold it is at 7am. Probably 50F. Then warming throughout the day, much like Friday. In fact, Friday afternoon was really nice. Warm, sunny, clear… really nice. And I’m hoping for some more of that today.
I did office stuff in the morning, then did a pickup in the afternoon. Stopped and got a propane bottle filled, went by the secondary location, stopped at the shop and spent a couple of hours sorting and organizing. Didn’t get to storage, but did make progress so there might be room for it when it does come over.
Today I’m up early to get youngest and two of her friends to a school thing, then get them back home after. Then I need to get her to school for another thing that will go all afternoon and evening, with an afterparty…
W and D1 are headed to look at a college, with W continuing on to the BOL. She’ll stay the night and then pick up the kid on her way home. Kid will be staying with a friend. I’ll be home shuffling D2 around and working on the list.
It’s hard to complain. I will anyway. But by any metric I’m a blessed man. Gotta remember that.
Stack something. Count your blessings.
nick
Saturday. Good morning!
Working for the man today – something that has to be ready on Monday, so short Schrift here. Blessings? I have a job, for one.
Have a beautiful weekend.
I’m up, coffee is started, and the sausage, egg, biscuit is in the microwave…
Relevant kinder has been poked.
Got to sleep in an extra ½ hour vs a normal school day. Joy.
I got two pages into a new book before fading to black. I’ll take it with me to read while waiting for the kids to finish.
I have good kids and they have good friends, and I do what I can to support them.
n
@steve, at least if you are up this early, you’ll be first in the queue for service….
And the mini dinosaurs probably need attention anyway. Right?
So it’s all good that you get no sleep, you are there to amuse the birds.
n
Oh, 48F and clear.
n
Perl is a write-only language, but it has its place if used in a way consistent with Unix philosophy.
A lot of propellerheads saw the shelf full of Perl books at Borders and Barnes & Noble 25 years ago and decided that was the future.
Hot Skillz 2000!
And learn PowerBuilder or lose your job.
The shell is not a place to write very complex actions, especially if the process runs as root.
Python pretty much ate the world in the last 20 years since it offers objects and an SQL database engine (SQLite) “out of the box”.
Addendum to the early morning comment: It is now 17 degrees F colder outside than it was at 0200 and projected to drop another 5 during the day. I partially disassembled the furnace, checked a few things online … and don’t know what the problem is. There are contradictory indicators. Definitely need a tech. Waiting for the installer to call me back. If I don’t hear from them within the hour, I’ll start calling around.
In case of true emergency, I have one of the diesel-burning hot air blowers, as recently discussed. Only problem is that there’s no good way to get the hot air into the basement. Well, worse come to worst, I can break glass, cut a hole in a metal panel, and route the hot pipe through that. Hardly ideal but, hey, I was a hillbilly when young so hillbilly-ing up a solution is part of my upbringing.
Meanwhile, the chickens are not happy because the wind was from the north and blew snow into their covered run, and the obstacles are all set up to block the prevailing westerly winds. Well, they’ll survive, probably.
Perl 5 exposes a lot of the Posix API and still has some of the fastest file system manipulation routines of any scripting language.
Linux is the Posix API OS which is why it ate the world.
Once Red Hat bought Cygwin and changed the license allowing use of the environment for commercial purposes, it was Game Over for the competition.
Now IBM is essentially Red Hat with a few side hustles in hardware, and Cygwin’s license has changed to the point that even Motif is available without the kabuki of LessTif.
Cygwin does a lot more than provide a shell with support utilities. It is essentially an attempt to provide a Linux-flavored Posix environment on top of Windows, complete with X.
IBM now owns X as well, but its days are numbered.
Cobie Smulders shows up in the last minute of the finale. Something to look forward to in S05 which is already filming. And the book S05 is based on has Bosch in it. I hope a crossover is worked out. Bosch is Haller’s ½ brother. And Cobie says she’s Haller’s sister. Yowzer!
Boasberg is still around and ugly:
The Trump White House Declares War on This Little District Judge
At least tRump is giving him the finger. If you come here illegally, a boot in your ass is your due process. Crimmigrants should be road marched back to their shiteholes.
Imagine if all these activist fukstiks got out of the way for tRump’s last 3 years? Real work would get done.
The DHs are about 15,000BTU on high, or about ½ what a cheap propane tank top heater.
It isn’t much for a basement in a cold area, but it is dry air, compared to propane.
Furnace is fixed. Turns out the problem was a clogged drain line, which led to water building up around the inducer fan (which blows the exhaust gas out of the house), so the motor couldn’t get up to speed, so the control circuitry wouldn’t light the burner. It took the technician about a minute to diagnose and less than ten minutes to fix everything. This doesn’t happen often, so it’s unlikely that anyone but an experienced tech would recognize it right off. (Or so he said. He might have just been trying to keep me from feeling dumb for not figuring it out myself.)
I had figured to have it blow into the small room where the water line comes in and splits off into different pipes. Most of the rest of the plumbing in this house is more-or-less above the water heater, and the closet and the “utilities” space over it were quite warm even with the furnace not working. I can handle a freezing house if I have to and we could have sent wife and m-i-l and aides to a hotel if needed, so all that was essential was to keep the pipes from freezing.
BTW, the HVAC tech said he’s been working over 12 hours a day, every day. They’re short-handed, and of course this time of year most of the calls they get are urgent.
(Related: Temperature is now below 0F outside, projected to drop for at least the next 12 hours. And the wind is gusting into the 20s, maybe low 30s, MPH. Stupid weather.)
While we waited to make sure everything was working, we grumbled about the shortage of people going into the trades. “You know what this country needs? More young men with marketing degrees.” Bill “Sneaky Penicillin” Gates and his libtard wife need an extra kick in the crotch for pushing “everyone” to go to college.
Saturday. Tea-time, so of course I am now having my lunch.
Unfortunate that someone mentioned lobbing grenades into Turkish establishments, as I am enjoying a dürum köfte adana (spicy mutton meatballs from the grill, served with sauce, salad and fries, all wrapped in a wheat flour tortilla (dürum). Recommended for a guilty-pleasure snack. W1 is still en route home from skiing, so it might go unnoticed…
I’m spending this weekend working for the man on a complex task that involves a significant number of long documents. I notice a generation gap. Younger colleagues have no concept of hygienic file or version management (using servers, folders, meaningful filenames, multiple backups, date stamps, etc., etc.). It is enormously frustrating and leads to a lot of wasted time and energy. Fortunately, the waste is on their part, so I won’t be blamed for it, although it still annoys me.
They seem to be so habituated in private life to idiot-proof devices that do their file management for them that they have no clue how to do it for themselves.
Hey, SteveF! Thanks for the early morning shout-out from the timezone and heating impaired. Glad you got your furnace going again.
Our propane was finally, and fortunately, delivered on Wednesday, and the boiler restarted without drama, so the house will be warm enough again for W1 when she arrives tonight. Bullet dodged.
Happy days!
Bill, Melinda and the rest of the PLT’s just had the pulpit. The real heavy lifting was done by the NEA, AFT, and the state teacher’s unions, who systematically destroyed the best educational system in the world over a mere two generations, and put sub-standard graduates in the pipeline who routinely needed remedial math and English before tackling freshman courses.
A h/t to the courts for contributing by imposing busing as a means of delivering kids to school totally indifferent to learning after enduring an extra hour of the Darwinian luxury yella bus.
Particularly ironic this month, when we have four weeks of celebrating skin color and entitlement as a means of distracting from not learning, and the near total omission of any mention of President’s Day when kids used to study the foundations of the country.
One of the joys of working with the VMS operating system was automatic versioning of text files, mostly containing source code.
I’d have an all-day editing session writing DCL script code, and I could edit DO_IT.COM a hundred times. Each saved file would be out there, as DO_IT.COM;100 down to DO_IT.COM;1
Hygiene would be to purge the file when it’s complete and debugged, and get rid of the now unneeded backup copies. But up to that point, they were available to review and recover.
That guided my future self while developing complex SQL queries on Windows. I would manually save preliminary versions as QUERY_V1.SQL, and then the next would be QUERY_V2.SQL, and so forth.
Unlike VMS, though, I’d always kick myself when I got to V10, because the file sort got out of sequence. I never did learn to start off with V001 instead of V1.
Of course, I seldom used QUERY as the filename. I’m a believer in names more in the fashion of “C:\Users\lpdbw\source\repos\VanityCallsigns\CreateAndLoadAncillaryTables.sql”
Trump Wins Big as 5th Circuit Upholds Indefinite Detention Without Bond for Illegal Immigrants
https://redstate.com/joesquire/2026/02/07/5th-circuit-upholds-indefinite-detention-without-bond-for-millions-of-undocumented-immigrants-n2198926
This needs to get immediately pushed to SCOTUS and made the law of the land.
In the meantime, the DOJ needs to dust off the statue discussed months ago that levies a fine against illegal aliens for every day they are here illegally. Part of the impetus for self-deporting and getting the FO of our country should be the prospect of going out without a f*cking dime if we have to do it the hard way.
Any why haven’t we slammed the remittances door, making it illegal for non-citizens to send money to other countries without proof of taxes paid?
the house will be warm enough again for W1 when she arrives tonight. Bullet dodged.
– indeed.
Home from the kid’s thing this morning… had an extra rider home so I ended up feeding 4 teenagers Chik Fil A for breakfast. Each one had a 16oz Dr Pepper as a drink. YeeHaw Texas!
Now they’re headed to school for their thing today, and I’ll be home alone for a few hours. Hopefully I’ll get something done.
n
Haha
and
Stop being activists and social engineers and get back to making and selling cars.
n
I feel your pain, from all the times I drove kids home after school*, especially after sports practice.** Or when the allegedly responsible adults – parents, teachers, whoever – neglected to provide food or water to kids who were kept in some location or some activity for hours.
* The kids greatly preferred when it was my turn in the car pool. We’d stop at the grocery store on the way home and I’d give my daughter money so everyone could get snacks and drinks and eat in the car while I got the week’s groceries. Purely self-servingly, they suggested that some other parent take them to school on days when there was no bus and then I pick them up after.
** In theory they were intelligent teens and could bring extra food and drink for after sports. In practice, teens are not known for forethought or self control and their extras were often consumed during lunch.
You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.
That’s great news, as it means despite my impending retirement, I’m still a teen!
Just went out to check on the birds and give them a treat. (Because they deserve it! They’re extra special and have never gotten a treat in their entire lives! Just ask them!) The coop thermostat shows -10.5C/13F at the probe despite the lamp having been on continually since maybe 0800. The brooding bays are colder. The wind has picked up even more and it’s just blowing all of the heat out. There were five eggs, all frozen, two cracked, one shattered. Stupid weather.
My son told me I was nice when he was maybe five. No, I’m not. I’m generally helpful unless I have a reason not to be. I’m generally good by my ethical standards, which do not necessarily match the standards of the culture. I can be personable if I feel like putting forth the effort. I’m effective, sometimes shockingly so, at getting things done.
What I am not is nice. Nice is avoiding offending people even when the truth would help them. Nice is agreeable no matter how offensive or incorrect the other person is. Nice is lying. Nice means following rules and expectations even when they don’t make sense or are unreasonable or get in the way of getting shit done.
Nice is dumb.
I look well younger than I am, call it early 50s.
I act like anything from a five-year-old to a teen. Split the difference and call it a 10-y-o.
Averaging the two, I’m about 30. Not bad!
*The coop thermostat shows -10.5C/13F at the probe despite the lamp having been on continually since maybe 0800. The brooding bays are colder. The wind has picked up even more and it’s just blowing all of the heat out. There were five eggs, all frozen, two cracked, one shattered. Stupid weather*.
Yikes! Diesel heater weather?
I had a text from the insulation guy. They can do three inches of closed cell for $7000. I think I’m going with the original plan of two inches for about $4000.
A few reasons. Recommended R values for floors in this area a R-19. Go a few counties, say, 70 miles south or west from here and the recommended R value is 13. By the maps I’m on the edge between R-13 and R-19. ANYTHING is better than the nothing I have now.
And you know what? Mr. Buffalo Nickle is having a problem seeing the break even point with an extra $3000 of insulation. That buys a lot of electricity for the heat pump and pellets for the wood stove. 30 years ago, sure.
Also, web sites say the stuff is applied in two inch layers. Because that’s what it needs to cure properly. The foam makes heat as it cures. I suppose that’s why the extra inch costs three grand, they are basically doing the job twice.
So yeah. Back off back to the original plan and don’t even bother messing with tucking the existing fiberglass up to seal that area off. That gets me back to the original $3600 guesstimate.
Plans. Yep.
American Olympians Bash Their Own Country As Democrats and Media Gush
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/josephchalfant/2026/02/07/american-olympians-bash-their-own-country-as-democrats-and-media-gush-n2670915
F*CK THEM ALL.
Here’s hoping they all get Sonny Bono Memorial trees.
They are free to leave at any time, become citizens of, say, Canada, and see how they like it.
How about this: When they try to re-enter the USA, the machine beeps and displays “Citizenship revoked”. BP pulls it up on the screen and says, “Yup, while you were away you were voted out and your citizenship given to a legal immigrant. Sorry/not sorry. Turn around and get TAF out of my country–it ain’t yours no more.”
And while we’re in the neighborhoo:
F*ck the NFL and f*ck Bilious Bunnie.
become citizens of, say, Canada,
– not gonna happen. Canada does not want Americans. Terrorists from the middle east? Free apartment and welfare plus a job. Bring the whole family.
n
Great lakes ice cover running 50% above 50-year average.
Lake Erie at 96% and has not iced-over this century.
https://x.com/AnthonyFarnell/status/2019549148698276178
The student loan paper held by the Feds was the largest revenue generating asset the US Government owned prior to the pandemic.
The GSL program was nationalized to pay for Obamacare in order for the bill to pass under Reconciliation.
We had to pass the bill to find out what was in it.
Stellantis gave all of their R&D budget to Musk in the carbon credit grift.
The best they can do right now is retrofit a V6 into the Charger EV platform.
Fiat and the rest of stellantis can suck it. Crap brands, crap management.
n
Amen.
Most of the ICE vehicle manufacturers seem finally to be backtracking on switching to electric. That is a good thing, as I don’t want an EV.
lpdbw, your VMS file numbering scheme sounds a lot like mine, though I tend to start each series at File_000.* rather than File_001.* as the “noughty” item is clearly the first. When I started my professional life, the firm I was working for had a fantastic system that automagically tracked all files, documents, iterations and versions. It was probably really to do with billable hours, but it made file management very simple. I don’t understand why such a useful tool is not in widespread use, or even part of desktop operating systems today.
It’s gone 1am, so I am knocking off work. I am stiff and sore from sitting basically motionless all day since morning, and my eyes are gritty and tired from working on screen. I’m very glad I got the pair of new, bigger, Samsung monitors.
Happy dance time. W1 arrived home safely, in one piece and without plaster casts, despite having been skiing. I am relieved on all counts. I might actually manage to have a conversation with her over breakfast, work permitting.
SteveF’s frozen eggs sound dramatic. Poor wee dinosaurs!
The house is warm. I hope my bed is warm too. Paul, the biggest warmth gains we have had in renovating two houses were each time achieved by adding ceiling and/or roof insulation and in switching to double or triple glazing. These days, triple is definitely the way to go, as it is no longer significantly more expensive than double. Only after those would I consider underfloor insulation, but our houses do not have void underneath them, and three or four grand for your job doesn’t sound excessive. Good luck with it.
Goodnight, all!
I never took thermo, but I did study some introductory info about HVAC when I took a college class on solar energy in 1976.
The first insulation you add has an enormous payback. The more you add, the less payback you get. The trick is to find the sweet spot, and that depends on many factors. It’s for this reason that rules of thumb were developed.
You lose heat through conduction, convection, radiation, and infiltration. The simplest to calculate is conduction. The R-value is a measure of resistance to conduction. Doubling your R-value halves your heat loss due to conduction. But it has no effect on infiltration and probably little effect on convection and radiation. This is known as diminishing returns.
After a certain point enough is enough for conduction, and you need to consider radiant barriers and weatherstripping and caulking. Your modern triple paned windows address all of the heat loss methods, but even they have limits and costs.
If you stop 100% of the infiltration issues, you’ve just traded one issue, heat loss, for another, air quality. Quality air needs to be changed over time, and you can go too far stopping that.
When we looked at solar heat, the tendency was to over-insulate, because solar heat tends to be diffuse and limited and a huge investment in heating plant.. You only get your 700 watts per square yard or so for a few hours a day. You have to collect enough, and store it efficiently, to maintain comfort all night long.
Our model house used heated-air solar collectors, with the hot air pumped through 1000 gallon septic tanks full of pea gravel for storage. Pump heat in all day from the collectors, and out all night from the tanks.
The success of such a product depends on local climate and latitude. Even as far South as St. Louis, it was very iffy.
All this is to say that it’s likely that when it comes to adding insulation, enough is enough. Insulate uninsulated spaces but don’t go too far because there’s no payback.
Woman With Autism Testifies She Wasn’t Trying to Interfere With ICE, Which Brought Receipts
https://twitchy.com/brettt/2026/02/07/woman-with-autism-testifies-she-wasnt-trying-to-interfere-with-ice-which-brought-receipts-n2424774
Wonder what it would have been like if she was trying?
There are at least 5-6 others that should have been taken to the ground and cuffed. All of them deserved charges.
Saints and begorrah, another fine Irish surname.
And more pricey outerwear.
Fine Homebuilding magazine wouldn’t admit it but all the super insulated air sealed houses they built in the 70s-80s-90s in the north east need remediation now. They were too insulated, but often air sealing details were missed, which led to condensation and rot in places you couldn’t see it.
If modern construction is too tight, you need a mechanical ventilation system running all the time, called a Heat Recovery Ventilator, or E(nergy)RV. The houses brad pitt’s foundation built in New Orleans have all failed, partly because of the need for ventilation (which the occupants didn’t do) and partly because of the airtightness. My 1940s crapshack has open balloon framed walls, ship lap siding, and ship lap interior walls, with T n G wood floors. It’s drafty as hell but it hasn’t gotten wet or rotted or grown mold in 80 years in the swamp. Any moisture or condensation quickly dries. As far as comfort, simply stopping the airflow was the quickest, cheapest, and easiest thing to do. It’s essentially un- insulated with single pane windows. In our climate, it works.
@paul, I think you should do it, although long term I might worry about trapped condensation. I think your biggest gain will be because it’s air sealed, followed by the R value.
I wish we’d done the windows in this house in 2008 when we moved in because the cold coming in around them is really distracting.
n
Stopped on my way home from dropping the kid at school and hit an estate sale. Bought 3 tubs of 45s, mostly classic country, some new country, and a ¼ contemporary (80s) and classic pop. Most of them are in great condition. I’ll probably sell them even though there are plenty I like, as I don’t have a jukebox and someone out there does and is looking for records to put in it.
Got a couple of other smalls too, like vintage pocket knives and Swank mens accessories. The lady was a successful Avon rep, so despite the literal poundage of jewelry, I don’t think there was a single good piece there.
n
“Love Lost (The Kurtherian Gambit)” by Michael Anderle
https://www.amazon.com/Love-Lost-Kurtherian-Gambit-3/dp/1545163901?tag=ttgnet-20/
Book number three of a twenty-one science fiction and paranormal fantasy series. There is also an eleven book follow on series and several other books related to the The Kurtherian Gambit Universe, over 200 books in total. I read the well printed and well bound POD (print on demand) trade paperback self published by the author in 2015 that I bought new on Amazon in 2026. I own the next two books in the series already. The related series are listed at:
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?46598
The series is a cross between science fiction and paranormal fantasy. A thousand plus years ago, an alien space ship crash landed in the Baltics. A man, Michael, found the space ship, went inside, and was forever changed into the first vampire using alien nanocytes. However, there were werewolves and werebears already existing on Earth and they still exist.
Michael has sired vampires and they have sired vampires. But only one of the vampire “children” is a daywalker like Michael. And Michael enforces strict rules among the vampires and the weres, no blood drinking, no letting humans know of them, etc. Violators of Michael’s rules face swift termination.
But it has been thousand years since Michael was changed and he now sleeps for years at a time. Michael helpers found a young woman named Bethany Anne working for the USA government who is dying of a rare blood disease and Michael took her to the alien space ship to become the second first generation vampire on Earth. Now Bethany Anne is cleaning Earth of the evil vampires and weres. And somebody just killed her old beloved boss.
This series is real pulp like old science fiction with lots of action and dialogue. I love it !
Warning: this series might be damaging to your savings account since there are so many books.
The author has a website at:
https://lmbpn.com/
My rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars (5,333 reviews)
Lynn
After a certain point enough is enough for conduction, and you need to consider radiant barriers and weatherstripping and caulking. Your modern triple paned windows address all of the heat loss methods, but even they have limits and costs.
We love our triple pane windows with the inner plastic sound shield here, just thirty miles away from the Gulf of America. They give a double bonus, both in the summer and in the winter. Of course, the rest of the 1998 house is leaky as all get out.
Hurray! Freedom seeds for cheap!
Oh.
This one, spotted on Old NFO’s, got a chuckle.
https://x.com/usmissiongeneva/status/2015861186865332631
Medal of Honor to be awarded to naval aviator for a dogfight in the Korean War.
The gentleman is nearly 101 years old. I hope they don’t delay the presentation.
Had my tiny little fire and read while waiting for D2 to get home from her after event party. She was at the door without a minute to spare from her curfew. But she had a good time and the kids she’s with are good kids.
One critter came by, a large orange cat with an improbably fluffy tail. It nosed around the water feature and then left in a dignified hurry when it figured out I was sitting right there. Haven’t seen Mr Possum in some time. Maybe he came to a bad end, or maybe he just changed his nightly patrol pattern.
Then I read for a bit longer and now it’s past time for a shower and bed.
n