Hot and humid, back in Houston. It was another hot day at the BOL with really high humidity yesterday. Yard work in the sun was debilitating. Had to go in and cool down several times. It was very nice at night though.
I spent Monday doing stuff, mostly yard and outdoor stuff. Spent some time talking with my buddy. Chatted with another neighbor for a bit too. Meatspace baby. Yard looks nice, if cut a bit short. I couldn’t cut it any longer though, so I hope I didn’t just kill the whole thing. If it rains soon, it should be ok. Then I put stuff away and eventually came home.
Today I’ve got a couple of auction pickups. Fewer this week than usual- I am trying to cut back. I’ve got some shopping to do and some office stuff as well, and I really need to visit my auctioneer in person.
I’ve got a bunch of stuff to do before I drop off the face of the world for a week. Which is what it will be like if I spend a week doing earthwork at the BOL. That’s predicated on getting the rental equipment, and they haven’t confirmed the availability yet. If they don’t, I’m not sure what I’ll do. I’m sure I’ll find something worth doing.
Besides stacking.
nick
“Money shot” gets right to the point.
Take this commercial for instance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9j03Nvg3Mo0
The 80s. My would-be love child is 38 this year.
Yes, I know for sure he’s not, but the girl and the family of the actual father are politically active.
The girl was a finalist for “Teacher of the Year” in Florida about 20 years ago, and she served on the city council of Lake Wales, FL.
But I am more likely to use the term “money line”.
“Well, I, for one, am v…v…v…ery interested to see w…w…what’s going to happen next.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ta3tLhzuas
The kid’s picture appeared several times in the local paper over the years, and I always got the question because he looks similar and did something with computers in high school.
“She had a ‘type’, okay?”
“It says here that the father is military and did two combat tours in Iraq.”
“Show Ya”.
83F and sunny. Looks nice out at the moment.
——-
Had a donut. Tea in the mug. Coffee later.
Time to reengage with my local list.
n
I particularly dislike “body count” as a measure of hoeishness.
Though that does invite opportunities for amusing misunderstandings. Some years ago my 20-something coworkers (where they are referred to as coworkers merely as a courtesy) were bragging about their “body counts”. (Open-plan office with no way to escape the non-stop babble. Bah.) One of them demanded to know my “body count”, almost certainly in an effort to shame the boomer, who lived before sex was invented. (Not that I’m a boomer, except in the sense that the popular cutoff between boomer and Xer is adjusted yearly so that 60-year-olds are shunted into the boomer box.) No one believed it when I told them that it was 100-something, maybe 150. No way, old man, you got no game. Never mind that I’d been married (to the same woman, odd notion that that may be in the modern world) since before any of them entered high school so of course none of them saw me putting on the charm with young women. (OK, “of course” is too strong, as a number of married people don’t hesitate to flirt.) Anyway, after a few minutes they realized what I meant and the room got quiet for a bit.
Yeah, I don’t like that one either. I’m astonished that women will brag on social media that they have triple digit ‘body counts.’ At 30 yo you’d have had to work to achieve that.
the stats for STDs are even more disgusting.
n
As someone who was out of the dating pool for the better part of three decades, I have been learning a lot…
I was asked this question on a dinner date and assumed it meant the same as SteveF. When my answer was “mid-300s to mid-500s; I can’t really be sure”, there was a long silence from the other side of the table. Thankfully, she asked a clarifying follow-up question, but then the silence was even longer.
BTW, if anyone else over 0x32 finds himself afloat in the brave new dating world, I have found this YT stream to be helpful: https://www.youtube.com/@YourWingmam .
“Qatar threatened to cut EU LNG supplies over sustainability law”
https://gasprocessingnews.com/news/2025/07/qatar-threatened-to-cut-eu-lng-supplies-over-sustainability-law/
“Qatar has threatened to cut gas supplies to the European Union in response to the bloc’s due diligence law on forced labor and environmental damage, a letter from Qatar to the Belgian government, showed.”
“Qatar is the world’s third-largest exporter of LNG, after the U.S. and Australia. It has provided between 12% and 14% of Europe’s LNG since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.”
When one tries to control ones suppliers, one is usually an idiot.
BTW, if anyone else over 0x32 finds himself afloat in the brave new dating world, I have found this YT stream to be helpful: https://www.youtube.com/@YourWingmam .
Just watching her video was exhausting!
For you astronomy types…
There’s a double meteor shower happening. So, umm… google that up and enjoy. 🙂
And for you Astronomer types, two careers fell to earth a couple weeks ago.
I just downgraded my iPad from 26 Beta to 18.x, the current version. The latest Beta borked a lot of stuff. I couldn’t even touch the task bar without a crash. Restore rework perfectly, I just had to set up everything and download apps. I did have an old backup, but decided to give the iPad and enema instead.
I like iPadOS26, but the Beta is real wonky on my iPad Pro 13” (M4). I’ll wait until September for the release.
Astronomer just gave Gwyneth Paltrow a bunch of money to make promotional videos.
I’m sure that the fact that Paltrow is the ex-wife of Coldplay’s Chris Martin had absolutely nothing to do with the hiring.
I have had no significant issues on my iPad Air, 4th generation, so not the M series of chips. And I see no compelling reason to upgrade to a newer machine.
Am I crazy? In case you wondered, I’m looking at this:
https://www.northerntool.com/products/echo-straight-shaft-u-handle-brushcutter-primary-power-source-gas-engine-displacement-42-7-cc-model-srm-410u-5896571
$703.99 plus $11 shipping. Or $714.18 at Home Depot. For 8¢ I’m leaning towards Home Depot because I can pick it up at the store. “Ship to Store” beats waiting for UPS or whoever to drop it off at the gate.
If I open a Home Depot credit card they’ll take $50 off, They think I’ll carry a balance? Nope.
Maybe I can use my Ag exemption. $59 for sales tax is worth a try.
I need a new gas can anyway. No telling what kind of sludge is in the existing can. Assuming the existing can hasn’t UVed to death.
I checked, it can use the Oregon blades I have. They have chain saw teeth.
I have a Solo. Made in Germany. I forget what it cost but it was not cheap pushing 30 years ago. $350 pushing $400 I think. I have used the heck out of it, enough the shaft twisted off. Yea for warranty! They don’t make them anymore that I can find. Mine still works but it is old with lots of hours. It has a fuel leak. Not a bad leak but I’m not a huge fan of oily gasoline dripping down my leg.
Anyway. The cedar and elm trees have suddenly become too large to run over with the riding mower. The shredder on the Yanmar only cuts down to about 4 inches and it’s clumsy for trimming around trees and buildings.
Well, more shopping. Big River has parts, no total machine. I found a few places with a lower price but you can smell the scam through your monitor.
@paul, that’s a lot of bucks for a specialty machine. Can you get the job done with a brush cutter attachment for a regular trimmer? If not, or if you are going to get a lot of use out of it, having the two handles and the strap should make it easier and safer to use.
I don’t mind spending money on tools I’ll use the hell out of. Things I barely use or won’t be using at a critical time when failure of the tool means failure of the job, I’ll skimp on if I can’t find quality cheaply.
n
It is a lot of bucks. But I’ll do my best to wear it out. I have a lot of brush to whack.
They have a string head available.
The regular trimmer is electric. Who wants to drag a generator all over 25 acres? Not me.
It might be possible to swap the string head for a blade on the walk behind string mower but the directions says nothing about do so.
I just completed the form for ag exemption at Home Depot. Pretty painless. They gave me a Home Depot Tax Exempt ID number to use in-store or online.
The hard part was taking a picture of my id and resizing it. I felt like uploading a 4.79 MB picture from my phone would be rude. I resized it down to 31 KB. I never did get to scanning it properly but if a phone pic with a weird color cast work, mission accomplished.
I went through this process with Tractor Supply a couple of years ago and they almost lost the sale just for being so so nit picky.
“Maybe I can use my Ag exemption. $59 for sales tax is worth a try.”
absolutely. starve the beast whenever possible.
“I’m not a huge fan of oily gasoline dripping down my leg. ”
when you lie down with robots…
The next time I’m asked “what’s your body count” by some drooling imbecile, I can deflect the question by saying “Well, I used to work in porn.” It’s almost true, if you tilt your head and squint. Twenty years ago I did some consulting work for a small web services company. They needed some changes to a crawler, IIRC. One of their customers was a family of porn sites. I happened to notice an employee making thumbnails putting the client’s logo on hundreds of pictures. I suggested that this could be automated either with a tool like The GIMP or with Python and an image-handling library. The employee was interested in this idea (it turns out that looking at and processing a thousand porn pictures a day not only causes carpal tunnel problems but kills all interest in looking at such pictures) but the services company owner didn’t want to put time and money into it. Penny-wise, pound-foolish, in my view but it wasn’t my call. But the bottom line is, I was briefly in the porn business.
I don’t have a body count that needs more than my fingers. Too much of a stuffy prude or something. Still am. Are. Is. Whatever. But I never got sick, so…
I too use to work in porn. At an adult bookstore. Fixing broken 8MM films, knocking on doors to remind folks to drop a quarter, selling magazines and toys. I actually did read Playboy and Penthouse and Hustler for the articles.
All in all, it was a cool job.
Time for one more trip out for Buddy.
Many years ago one of my buddies, a mentor, was on a west coast flight in First/Business class. The guy next to him boarded, was on his cell until the door shut, and as soon as the light came on, he grabbed up the seatback phone and started talking again. He had a very animated and technical discussion, until they shut down the phones for landing. My buddy said “man, that was kind of an expensive phone call wasn’t it?” IIRC, it was about $4/minute to use the skyphone. The guy said “I’m the webmaster for a major pron site, and it’s down. While it’s down we lose $XXX, XXX. 00 PER MINUTE. If I could get the site back up before I get there, it would be a very cheap call….”
Six figures a minute is what I remember, and this was back when dollars were worth something, mid 90s to late 90s… paying for pron was a thing back then.
n
FWIW, we all have benefited tremendously from the pron industry. If you watch any streaming video, you benefit. Real and other players invented efficient streaming and the infrastructure to serve it, because every new technology gets adapted to pron… it’s said that Sony lost the home video market because they wouldn’t license Betamax for pron, and VHS would. Back in the day, VHS movies were $70 – $100 EACH. What other sort of film would you buy to watch over and over in your own home??
Another buddy from the entertainment world previously worked in an adult bookstore/peepshow. He was literally the mop and bucket boy. He liked chatting with the girls as they worked.
He never said, but it was clear that even working as a stagehand was universes better than that job…
n
umm..
Millions of Americans under threat of tsunami in just hours with urgent evacuations underway and sirens blaring as biggest earthquake in 14 YEARS rocks the planet
n
World’s biggest earthquake in 14 years sparks Pacific-wide tsunami fears
LIVE UPDATES: The world’s biggest earthquake in 14 years has plunged Japan, Russia and the entire west coast of America into tsunami watch with fears for millions.
CaCafornia? Oof.
Big earthquake. Tsunami height along WA/OR/CA coast forecast to be about 1 to 1 ½ feet. Risk is not just the wave height, but the current associated with it. Same forecast (roughly) for Japan area.
Warning has been downgraded, so not serious. Certainly not Fujiama (2011) level, which as 3-4 meters (approx 10-14 feet).
Big earthquake, though: 8.8 Richter magnitude.
VHS was cheaper on a per blank tape basis than Beta. The machines were cheaper too, which was important to the pr0n industry for duplicating tapes in ad hoc facilities built using consumer equipment like the one seen in “Boogie Nights”.
Windows 95 was really the key to putting free Internet pr0n in every home since it included a built-in TCP/IP stack and a consistent driver interface for hardware manufacturers of video cards and network adapters to target.
Windows 7 64 bit with mandatory WHQL dramatically improved pr0n delivery and made paid subscription video streaming possible.
Windows 11 closes the driver loophole which makes piracy of streaming possible.
Win95 had the networking, but without the compression, servers, caching companies, et al, in peoples’ homes the network would be a fancier sneakernet, or they would have stayed in the walled gardens like AOL or Compuserve.
We were still using dial up. MAYBE dsl. I was looking at ISDN and 4 bonded lines for my business in Cali, (couldn’t because the telco didn’t have the S7 switch or whatever it was that I needed.) I even did a trial deployment of fixed wireless thru ATT, but every time a plane flew thru the beam the signal dropped.
Bandwidth was hard to come by.
n
From the National Tsunami Warning Center:
Headed for the West Coast in about an hour (as I write this at 10:03pm PDT).
The next time I’m asked “what’s your body count”
In deference to your good self Mr.SteveF, the question might require a little more definition.. 😀
Cheers..
Windows 11 closes the driver loophole which makes piracy of streaming possible.
– while this may be true it won’t be the end of piracy or streaming. From the beginning it’s been a battle between the corps and the pirates. They steal movies OUT OF THE EDIT BAYS, with timecode running in the bottom third…
They have always found a way. People that want to do it will just use the $10 chinese boxes running Kodi with custom skins. No win11 in that thing. Fewer people using PCs every day…
Or they’ll get used to paying, like they already do with music. Kids today don’t pirate, they pay. Except for some pdf site the school turned them on to, it’s got everything ever published, apparently.
n