Not bugging out though. Warm. It’s been warm these last two days, starting as if it was cool, but getting to 80F pretty quickly. We had sun and some clouds most of yesterday, enough clouds that I didn’t load the truck, but no actual rain, and quite a bit of sunshine. I expect fewer clouds and more sunshine today.
I did get a couple of things done. Almost $100 for the aluminium scrap from the laptop things, and I kept the heavy cast aluminum caster bases. Paid for the lot, and $20/hour for scrapping, and I get to keep the batteries, chargers, and inverters. Win.
Took a load of trash to the dumpster too.
Then stopped in and saw my buddy and his wife at the Fun Store, did a quick trip through Goodwill, got gas and food at Costco, and made it home to make steak dinner for me and my wife. That will be our anniversary dinner. 21 years and counting.
Today I’m going to load up the truck and head to the BOL. We have a community cleanup day (which I will miss, but I do more than my share by mowing communal property, and all the road work and grading I did this year) and our annual LOA meeting. Our LOA is the Land Owners Association (like HOA) and had expired so has no enforcement ability. The dues are voluntary, and the meeting is mainly about road maintenance and one guy who always b!tches about his neighbor’s lot conditions. I like to be seen as participating and part of the community, so I always go.
It’ll be a short trip as I really just have to unload the truck, mow, and attend the meeting. I’ll probably sleep in Sunday and then come home. I don’t intend to stay late.
Of course, everything is subject to change.
The only certainty is that the universe laughs at our plans, and I’ll continue stacking.
nick
Considering yesterday’s late-night reports, I figured that the “load of trash” taken to the dumpster was D1. But no, the log above is about the day’s activities, generally not covering occurrences of the late evening. Well, there’s always the next dumpster run.
Saturday. Good morning!
Busy like a one-armed wallpaper hanger with a peg leg in an ass-kicking contest. Guests coming for lunch and to stay overnight. Beds to make, hoovering to be done, quiche to be baked. Etc., etc.
It is a lovely sunny day. Time for a walk in the woods after lunch. Maybe we will see some wild daffodils.
Everyone’s retriement is now tied to the Monkey Trick.
Someone figured out this week that Chipzilla is still important to making it all work.
Propellerheads like to think they can do without Intel and go all in on ARM, but even Nvidia knows that isn’t happening.
Fond and not so fond teenage memories.
I downloaded the free version of Grok and have tried to use it. Mostly I use it as a replacement for the increasingly useless search engines.
About 50% of the time you can’t get an answer because it’s too busy.
There is a drop down with previous questions listed but as far as I can tell you can’t retry the question with it. In fact you can’t even manually copy them and retry them. –\_O_/–
83F and a bright, light overcast with occasional sun poking thru.
D2 still at her away thing.
D1 in bed.
W1 off to do some fundraising for D2’s activities.
I’m going to have a pork chop and egg for breakfast, then shower and load the truck. I hope to be on the road by noon.
——————
Fond and not so fond teenage memories.
– told the kid that it’s traditional to sneak out and clean up the evidence to prevent parents from seeing it, NOT to ask THEM to do the cleanup. Many a car wash vacuum cleaner has been desecrated by a late night cleanup…
n
This is probably worth repeating. I have an iPad app that intercepts the address bar on Safari and lets you use different AI search engines. When I type “ai” then the query in the address bar, Perplexity, Grok, and ChatGPT open tabs with the query results.
It is interesting reading the different results. If you recall, I asked “I have a spaceship that can accelerate at a steady 1G, how long will it take to get to Titan?” Only Grok included Einsteinian relativity equations. Pretty cool. I’m only using the free versions.
I also paid for a course on AI LLMs and how to use them properly.
Relativity effects should be trivial. Depending on how closely you want to clip the sun, the maximum velocity in traveling from Earth to Saturn at a steady 1G should be under 4000 km/s even at the least favorable planetary positioning. I haven’t run any numbers but I’d think that including Jupiter and possibly other planets in the calculation would have a larger effect than relativity.
Perplexity:
Chat:
Note Chat includes relativity to show the couple of days time difference.
Grok wouldn’t respond. Even after I logged in with my X credentials.
!!!??? Grab a calculator and run some of those numbers yourself.
0.6c?????? It takes a full Earth year to reach light speed at 1g. Chat’s entire answer should be discarded.
Perplexity seems to have been thinking that you would make a straight line run between planets, even if they’re in opposition. When I mentioned comfort with getting close to the sun, I kind assumed that the minimum distance would be greater than 0. Also, the sentence which has both “constant acceleration” and “spends most of the trip coasting”, suggesting that this answer also should be discarded.
There’s a school bond election in Texas in a few days. I just found out about it today.
For here, 2 million for IT infrastructure. I looked more and found there is another 133 million for stuff. Like, as usual, new roofs and oh, yeah, tear down the middle school and rebuild it bigger.
Pinky swear, this ain’t gonna raise your property taxes.
Ok. If they were honest, there’s a run-off election on May 24 or so. Why the separate voting event?
Made it to Bryant Arkansas. There was a lot of truck traffic on I-30 but most of was moving smoothly at 75MPH or better. There were still several annoying trucks that would pull out quickly to block cars, then take the next five miles to pass the truck in the other lane. Typical truck driver behavior.
There was a lot of construction in Texas, in several locations. I had the bright idea to take I-35 rather than 130 as early on a Saturday there should not be much traffic in Austin. There wasn’t. But a lot of construction. I missed the entry to 130 off I-35 to bypass Austin. Oops.
The worst was just north of San Antonio, in the Universal City/Schertz/Selma area. The traffic wizards decided it was a good idea to squeeze four lanes of traffic into one lane. I jumped off at the Randolph exit, went some backroads to get on the frontage road. Nope. That access was blocked in several locations. Five miles of backroads later I finally found access to the frontage road and about half a mile to I-35 access, and fit right in the single lane of traffic, which lasted about a quarter mile..
I filled up the truck at the Costco at the Schertz/Selma area and had enough gas to make it all the way to Bryant without a refill. Not recommended as I was down to less than 80 miles range.
Tomorrow is the final push home, I-30 to I-40, through Memphis, Nashville, Cookeville, Crossville, then to the Harriman exist. There is a section of I-40 where there is a 5% grade for about six miles. No trucks are allowed in the left, printed on the pavement, big warning sign entering area, and signs along the road. Invariably some truck will ignore the signs, and be traveling 25 MPH trying to pass another truck doing 24.99 MPH. I try to get their truck number and will contact the trucking company. May just be a waste of time.
Saturday (now Sunday) bedtime.
Went for a walk in the woods with the guests. We found a clearing full of wild daffodils. Much ooh-ing and ahh-ing and taking of photos ensued.
We had dinner out at a well-known local restaurant where W1 and I had never been, and which is under new management. W1 and guests pronounced themselves replete and satisfied, so it passes the test. Fifty bucks a head for two courses and drinks. Food was copious, service between courses a bit slow, but otherwise pleasant.
Home for spirits and conversation. Nobody wanted a cheese plate, so there likely will be something cheesy for breakfast tomorrow…
Goodnight!
Is that a rhetorical question?
You know the answer.
The bond ghouls weren’t fully sated in the Fall special election, having lost a $1 billion general bond in Austin, mostly for homeless services, and several other mulcting opportunities.
Suddenly schools in the boonies need new roofs.
There’s probably a stadium in there too.
Made some Betty Crocker peanut butter cookies today, they tasted OK (not extraordinary, but decent).
Checking, after, BBD on the package was November 2021, I added a fresh egg and oil.
Good luck with that. I recently ran across the phrase “Chameleon Truckers”….
The sheer amount of damage the left has done to everything is astounding.
I make chocolate chip cookies from the Better Homes and Gardens recipe (circa 1984; I’ve had the book for a long time). I strictly follow the recipe, no special tweaks to make them tastier. And dozens of people have told me that they’re the best choc chip cookies they’ve ever had. The only thing I can think of is that I use butter rather than margarine, which most people and most industrial bakeries do.
I’ve made them with all butter, as a few people say they do, but don’t care for the taste. And I’ve made them with lard rather than vegetable shortening but most people that I give them to don’t care for them. (Most of these people are teens, so of course they still eat them even while they say they don’t really like them.)
FYI, my daughter and the classmates she’s shared the last batch with all say that they like the mini chips better than regular sized chips. I picked up a bag of mini chips by mistake once and the cookies were a hit. A bigger hit than usual, that is.
Contact US DOT, specifically the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. All big trucks which go on the public roads are registered with USDOT and they are typically tougher and stricter than state police departments.
“Is that a rhetorical question?”
Sorry. Forgot the /s tag. They always need new roofs and climate control. For the last 25 years. I didn’t see anything about a new sportsplex.
A couple of times it was successful. One company said the driver would be reprimanded. Another said the driver would be financially penalized. May have been lip service.
My son called a trucking company that was tailgating people on I-40W to get them move out of the driver’s way. Apparently he was not the only one that had called. The company told my son that at the driver’s next stop he would be removed from the truck, terminated, and given bus fare home.
Shots fired at the White House Correspondents dinner.
Made it to the BOL without incident. Several highways were receiving mainenance and had lanes closed but the backups weren’t too bad. I did spend 60 miles behind a guy doing 60 in the 75 mph part of the 2 lane state highway. I just drove 60. On a 2 hour journey, speeding might save the time equivalent of one extra red light. Not worth getting wound up about.
LOA meeting was without drama. Voted to give our VFD $500 since we had budget left after grading the road. Last year the complaint was not having enough money because people don’t pay their dues.
And the signs for our park/boat ramp, that we ok’d last year, are ready. Well, one is. We had to vote to approve another $300 to pay for the signs. Last year I was under the impression that the woman who volunteered to replace the rotten signs, was going to pay for them, not just design them. Oh well. I did get a pat on the back for mowing the park.
I mowed my own lawn, front before the meeting, lakeside after, AND I mowed the park after that. At least they picked up all the big limbs and trimmed around the obstructions.
Sun went down and it’s 76F with a light breeze. It was hotter this afternoon, but the breeze was stronger.
I am going to have a fire, and read on the dock tonight. Might spin the dial on the radio too, although my plan is to go down early, when reception isn’t great.
n
There was lots of Ham traffic on 20 meters a couple hours ago. This weekend is the Florida QSO party.
The construction around the exit to 45/130 in Buda is related to a new Buc-ee’s.
Buc-ee’s will have a location on either side of San Marcos once the new store is complete.
The Beaver is planning ahead. San Marcos will get the next NFL team in Texas.
Had a nice fire on the dock. Still 75F so it was warm but nice to see the flames. Something about a campfire that is good for the soul.
I was surprised that the little pocket SW radio pulled in a bunch of stations in 5mhz and 7, and even one in 9mhz with just its tiny little antenna, and at 9pm. I like it for a BOB radio if you are inclined that way.
Spent a couple of hours reading as the noise on the lake faded to silence. A few splashes and the occasional animal or bird call. I like it when it’s quiet here.
Time for a shower and bed.
n
Finished my snack, so it’s time for bed.
n
Don’t be a tease… share the recipe, please!
The video of the attempted shooting of President Trump indicates that present security detail is a lot more on the ball than past security detail. Quasi-instant appearance of officers with body armour and carbines protecting the VIP.