Warm, possibly clearing and turning into a nice day. It never really did yesterday, staying warm and humid, but overcast or cloudy. Still, not really winter. I had the windows down while driving, and it was nice enough.
I did auction stuff in the morning, winning two things for the BOL, then pickups in the afternoon. I followed that with a couple of hours of sorting at the shop, then dinner at home. Then more auction stuff, with a whole lot of lots in an estate sale. All home and household stuff, all at steep discounts. I’ll be picking that up today.
I have the estate sale to pick up, and then I’ll try to load the truck and head to the BOL in the late afternoon. I’d love to get through The Woodlands before 5, and I can do a pickup on the way if I do.
I’ll need to do some shopping before heading out though. I want to be sure I have what I need to do the electrical work I want to get done this weekend. Turns out it will just be me there, so I should be able to crank out some work. I’ve got bath fans to install, lighting to install, a heated towel bar, and some outlets. If I get that done, I can start setting up the networking and cameras.
There’s plenty of other stuff to do there too, including yard work, so I don’t think I’ll lack tasks. I’ll have to put away all the stuff I bring up with me too.
All in all, the next couple of days should be very busy.
It’s a good life if you don’t falter. Plus, I’ll get to use some of the stuff I’ve been stacking! While also adding to stacks. Win – win!
Join me in stacking, won’t you?
nick
Be right there.
I need a cup of coffee first.
And then another one.
I don’t think “Sandy” is truly dangerous, but the possibility is the appeal for a lot of people.
The Soy Boy is a lot of males my age and younger in Austin.
Woke up at 530 in that sleepy delusion that I was wide awake and rested. It WAS 5 hours of sleep…
Went back to bed like a sensible person.
Not super tired,but certainly not fully rested.
Coffee is almost ready.
—
I’m ripping some more dvds, currently have “The In-Laws” spinning. “Serpentine, serpentine!!”
n
Currently 70F and dark overcast. W says it rained overnight. I’ll have to check the gauge… I really need it to be clear this afternoon, so I can load the truck for the BOL.
n
Lots of rain this week and a clear night. 33F on weatherunderground local. Freeze warnings in the entire central valley. Not good when trees are already blooming. Plenty of new snow in the mountains – that’s good.
Sarah Hoyt has some interesting things to say, mixed in with some nonesense, but very high ratio today.
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/02/19/its-not-performative-dance/
The third point, “a civil culture that allows individuals to join in groups to solve a problem” is critical and why importing from a low trust, tribal or familial culture is so undesirable for the technological US.
n
NB she’s at her worst when talking about race, and best when thinking critically about her childhood and birth culture, imho.
SH’s nonsense to sense ratio is too high for me. Every now and again, I have another look, then go away disappointed.
Doing four weeks’ work in two is catching up with me. I am shattered. It was supposed to cease today, but now I am told Monday, for sure, maybe. I’ll play along until Monday, then I will insist that someone else be made available to take over the relay while I get some time off and rest.
Time for a shower and a nap.
I went to bed at 9:00 PM last night and slept in until 7:00 AM. Whatever this crud is it is really kicking my hiney. I am really tired and may be going back to bed shortly for some more sleep.
A lot of the coughing has dissipated, but not all of it. I still have coughing fits. Hopefully by Sunday I will be mostly over it and back to normal. Until then, life’s a bitch, then you think about dying.
RIP Tom Noonan.
He was in a lot of good movies, but I will always remember him as the serial killer in Manhunter (1986). I saw the movie in a dark theater late at night. The hair on my arms still goes up when I see a murder van (Dodge Caravan). The movie was redone as Red Dragon. In the books, this is where Hannibal Lector is first introduced.
All right, finally headed out to do my pickups and shopping.
I think it’s gonna be a late start to the BOL.
n
https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/steven-spielberg-leaves-california-new-york-wealth-tax-push-spurs-political-battle
Higher taxes are good for us peons, not him.
I just turned on the minty new PC. It seems to boots faster than my phone. I waited a minute and clicked the “start button” or whatever it is called and clicked Power. Sat the mouse to the side where the weight of the cord isn’t making it move. Arrowed left a couple of clicks to highlight Sleep and pressed enter.
It went to sleep. And it has stayed asleep. This makes no sense.
Perhaps something was running in the background to wake the machine. But re-booting did not help.
It’s almost 60F and cloudy. Not even a bright spot in the gray sky.
In Power Managemet I have “turn screen off when inactive” set to 5 minutes. I have “suspend when inactive” set to 15 minutes.
See seeing if this works.
The mouse goes to sleep. You have to push a key to wake up.. Shift works for me.
Time to rummage around for an external hard drive. I have too much stuff to copy stuff over one slow 64GB USB stick at a time.
“I don’t think “Sandy” is truly dangerous”
Uh-huh.
Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, PolPot …
One vaccine may provide broad protection against many respiratory infections and allergens
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2026/02/universal-vaccine.html
No mention of pneumonia.
I meant physically dangerous. That‘s the key to her appeal.
Slicing definitions too thin.
Advocating enslaving people and exterminating our dogs meets my definition of physically dangerous. I’d give her and the rest of her ilk free passage 12 miles into the nearest ocean, and if no other country wants to pick her up there it’s not my concern.
I’d entertain more efficient delivery, like put them in tin cans and fire them to the twelve-mile limit with railguns.
One thing for sure, I don’t have to copy everything. Like Misc Apps and Misc Utils. That’s all Window programs with some going back to 3.11.
So, Music, Video, and Documents. Plenty of stuff to delete from Documents. Like the folder “programs to try” and “windows stuff”.
I copied the Games folder too. It will be interesting to mess with wine and run Hover or Pinball. Yes, the Pinball from the Win95 Plus disc.
Plus the t-bird and FF profiles.
I think that’s about all. Profiles tomorrow. Probably. And then it’s just swap the mint pc for the Win11 pc.
Worse comes to worse, I might lose a couple of days of e-mail.
I see Ottawa is going to have to send out teams of brown shirts to confiscate guns in some provinces. Wonder if they will pacify the compliant first (read that to mean “the provinces where local law enforcement is fully ready to put on the jack boots”) to develop their methods before trying to go after the non-compliant provinces? Or may be they will call Cuba to inquire about their “Rent a soulless commie enforcer” program.
Ilhan Omar Just Called on Democrats to Abolish This Agency
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/jeff-charles/2026/02/20/ilhan-omar-says-democrats-want-to-abolish-dhs-n2671630
Will someone not rid us of this troublesome somali?
Ottawa could use the awe-inspiring might of the Canadian Army across the countryside to gather up the guns. Their army has over 20,000 active duty personnel! And several thousand of them are combat arms! And they’re allocated dozens of rounds per year per soldier for marksmanship training!
It was just announced that General Motors has hired Claudia Gast away from EV manufacturer Lucid Motors to be its new Vice President of Strategy, Corporate Development, and Technology Partnerships. In this role she will report directly to CEO Mary Barra. Ms. Gast will actually be wearing two C-Suite hats, as she will also be the new Deputy Chief Financial Officer, reporting directly to the CFO in that capacity. Ms. Gast’s role at Lucid Motors was Senior Vice President of Strategy and Business Development.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/gm-hires-new-head-strategy-lucid-motors-2026-02-09/
So, who’s in the market for a new Chebby now?
“Investors in Lucid stock have been taken to the cleaners. From its split-adjusted* IPO stock price of $150 per share in 2021, the stock peaked at over $550 per share in 2022, and has since fallen below $10 per share – a 98% decline. ”
CFO? LMAO
above quotes from:
https://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=418588
also:
“GM’s Board of Directors should have brought in (or promoted) industry veterans who understand what GM’s customers want to buy and what its dealers can sell. Instead, they’ve brought in executives who have experience managing cash burn and losses on low-volume, niche products. This negligent oversight by the Board is a dereliction of their fiduciary duty.”
DIE hire. How much of that $12 billion is buried under the floor of her garage?
NYT: Trump Is ‘Strangling Cuba’
https://hotair.com/ed-morrissey/2026/02/20/nyt-trump-is-strangling-cuba-n3812102
So now the commies want to do it right in NYC.
Makes perfect sense: Keep trying until everyone is dead or the money is all gone, or ideally, both.
CA Bends The Knee, Newsom Will Now Mandate English Proficiency Tests for Truck Drivers
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/dmitri-bolt/2026/02/20/ca-bends-the-knee-now-requires-english-tests-for-truck-drivers-n2671654
The article is unclear about the status of the funds.
What should happen is:
A total of $200 million isn’t much. I can see a claim of $10 million plus $100 million in punitive damages for a single loss of life.
“Ottawa could use the awe-inspiring might of the Canadian Army across the countryside to gather up the guns. Their army has over 20,000 active duty personnel! And several thousand of them are combat arms! And they’re allocated dozens of rounds per year per soldier for marksmanship training!”
I’m sure some of them are good little fervent commie gun grabbers.
I’m sure some of them have guns that are on the confiscation list.
I’m also sure that the Venn diagram shows some are both, and those are smug in their certainty that they deserve to be exempt from confiscation because they are so fervent.
I’m missing something over here. I copied the files from my Win11 Desktop to the Mint Desktop. I freely admit I might be slow as I get to my dotage and learing is more difficult.
Stuff is weird. A text file made on mint has the same icon as what I copied from windows. The mint file simply opens, the window’s file wants to know what to open with. But nothing has file extensions. So finding the setting to show extensions is something to look for.
Saved URLs are also whacky. Don’t just open with firefox, stupid firefox seems to open a tab for each line of the web page’s html file.
One text file I right clicked to open. Copied the contents and pasted into a new text file. Now it opens. Delete the original and re-name the new.
Pretty sure this is all a file extension suffix. Like, .txt versus .text. Just guessing, Google thinks I’m looking for some way to import from Mint to Quickbooks. Crazy.
I’ve had enough for the day.
If you buy into the widely held theory among the expats in Miami, Canada already had a Castro as Prime Minister.
I tend not to believeve the theory, but security was tight when Wee Pierre was summoned to Mar A Lago to receive his walking papers prior to the Inauguration last year. No one knew Trudeau was even in South Florida until after his plane was in the air heading back to Ottawa.
Mint was a budgeting app which Intuit ran into the ground after buying out the founders.
IIRC, they kept the app for a while after shoving Quicken out the door to private equity.
With those teeth? Uh, nooooo.
More thinking. Like the movie says, Ow, my balls!
Windows, riding on top of DOS, used 8.3 file names. Yeah I know, that changed with Win 95 and for sure with Xp. But the three letter file extension persisted.
So. You can have an HTML file. Just a basic web page. Like index.htm in windows and index.html on the ‘nix side.
Clearer than a mud puddle I hope.
Well, Mint seems to do the Windows default of hiding the file extension suffix. I need to find that setting.
So happy ol’ me comes along and renaming what I named Olive Butter.txt on Windows and copied to the Desktop on Mint doesn’t simply open. on Mint. Renaming the file with no extension doesn’t work. But Mint knows it’s a text file…. because of the icon. But, like autoexec.bat is an executable text file so Danger Will Robinson.
Right clicking to open a text file is a pita. I save lots of stuff as plain text.
I’ll try something like olive.txt and rename it to olive.text. Might work. Doubt it without being able to see file extensions.
I’ll get this figured out. Mint seems to be so simply “just works” it’s worth some teething pains.
I had a post card that Costco is opening in Liberty Hill. Google says near Seward Junction.
Nice. Beats going to the Costco on 1483 a few blocks from the 183 toll road.
Worth $65 a year just to enter? No, I don’t think so.
Makes sense. Santa Rita Ranch is filled with Colonists.
Colonists dominate the customer base for all of the new development along Ronald Reagan from University up to where Reagan intersects with I-35 north of Georgetown.
Colonists love Costco, but, for some reason, they don’t seem to like going to the Georgetown Costco as much as the one in Cedar Park.
Truck is loaded, and I’m just about ready to head out.
At least I missed the traffic thru The Woodlands and Conroe.
One last potty and pack the cooler and I”m on my way.
n
If you installed with the Cinnamon interface, I believe you can try MATE relatively easily.
The reverse is also true.
Flipping around channels I found the Movies! Channel is showing Hopscotch. Walter Matthau, Glenda Jackson, Ned Beatty, Sam Waterston. Ca 1984 from a Brian Garfield book. Recommended. It’s like someone doubted Garfield‘s ability to write spy fiction as funny as Westlake or Thomas, and this is his reply.
“You’re making my dog nervous and he hates the smell of stupidity”
Made it to the BOL. So many cops tonight. More than I’ve seen total in the time we’ve been coming up here. And most had someone pulled over. W says they are surging because there is a big car show, and they don’t want street racing, etc. Lotta cops.
60F here, dark and quiet. I’m going to shower and read for a while with the goal of an early night and an early morning.
Lotsa work to do.
n
Hopscotch, btw, was 1980.
Shoulda known from the hair.
I think I’ll read for a bit, and go to sleep.
n
Saturday. Too early. Dark. Good morning.
Still working like a slave, but took a couple of hours off for a nice Italian pizza with W1 and her guests. “Pizza della casa” is goat’s cheese, bacon matchsticks, black olives and honey. Delicious.
Rounded dinner and myself off with zabaglione. Also delicious, and fun because they make it on a little gas burner at the table. Entertainment value.
Paul, IIRC, when I double-click a textfile that was not created under Mint, it asks me whether I want to run it, display it or do something else. If I select “display”, it comes up in whatever the text editor is. Once I re-save it using that application, Mint knows that it is a textfile for editing, and doesn’t ask me again.
Time to see if I can roll over and get a couple of hours’ more sleep…
“my mother loved to ask, “what is wrong with you?””
“At the young age of 5,
a bear told me that I am
the only person who can
prevent forest fires.”
“Why I was chosen,
I will never know.”
“I don’t think “Sandy” is truly dangerous”
Uh-huh.
Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, PolPot …
You forgot Eva Perón.
Is an Apple iPad Air 3rd gen, 64gb storage, 26.3 OS, comes with case, detachable keypad, and usb cable for charging worht very much?
$120-150 based on my research. A lot will depend on the condition of the device. Scratches will drop the price 25% or more. Cracked screen will drop the price to almost nothing.