08:17 – Costco run and dinner with Mary and Paul yesterday.
There was an article in the paper this morning about a rash of incidents of coyotes snatching small pets. Apparently, they’ll actually jump a fence, seize a cat or small dog, and jump the fence again holding the prey. Not that we have to worry about Colin. If there’s one thing a coyote is afraid of, it’s a wolf. Wolves kill coyotes for sport. And Colin is wolf-like enough to terrify any coyote. Not to mention that he outweighs a large male coyote by a factor of two.
Our natural gas logs won’t stay lit. We had them installed in 1996, immediately after an ice storm had left us without power for four days. Since then, they’d periodically refuse to stay lit. I’d always just used canned air to blow out the oxygen sensor and thermocouple area and everything would usually be fine. If not, I’d remove the concrete logs, vacuum out the thing, and then blow it with canned air.
This time, it didn’t work. We started having problems a week or so ago. I tried blowing them out, and it didn’t work. The pilot light would stay lit but when I turned on the gas the logs would burn for five or ten minutes and then shut off. So yesterday we did the vacuuming thing and re-lit the pilot light. The pilot light was still burning this morning, so I fired up the logs. They burned for five minutes and turned off.
Barbara dug out the manual and invoice. I called Piedmont Natural Gas this morning. It’s not an emergency, so they won’t be able to come out to look at them until tomorrow. I hope they can repair them easily. The company that made the logs went bankrupt in 2002, so we may be out of luck if a new part is needed. Worst case, we’ll replace them. We sure don’t want to be without them if we have another long-term power failure.
I’d be careful around those coyotes, Bob. Coyotes are getting bigger, the eastern ones can be found upwards of 50 lbs, which puts them solidly in the “as large as Border Collies” camp, and they travel in packs. They’ve killed not just small pets, but larger animals, including the Most Dangerous Game: humans. Coyotes may actually be as smart as Colin, too. After all, they are amongst the most successful animals in North America, and are actively enlarging their territory, and have figured out a way to live with humans and not have to carry then damn slippers.
BTW, the eastern coyote is bigger than the western one, due to interbreeding with wolves. So I don’t think they’re as afraid of wolves as you might believe. Or perhaps the wolves have taken up a new sport?
Yeah, wolves rape female coyotes. I’m sure our coyotes are larger than they used to be, but they still fear wolves and dogs. It’s pretty hard to overcome a few million years of evolution.
I’m not sure how much Colin weighs, because we don’t have a bathroom scale. We brought him home at about 9 weeks old, and he passed 35 pounds not too long after that. Duncan was about 70 to 75 pounds as an adult. He was a standard rough-coat BC, and when we bathed him he looked positively scrawny. Colin is a smooth-coat, and he looks noticeably larger than Duncan, both in height and bulk. I’d guess he’s at least 70 pounds now, and he may well be up in the 80+ p0und range.
Als0, not to be discounted, Colin has erect (wolf) ears. They don’t call it “dog-earing” a book for nothing. Those erect ears scream wolf to other animals, including dogs. Just those erect ears are probably enough to frighten a coyote.
Finally broke down and moved to the dark side of the force. Got me an IPAD2. Wanted something that I could easily carry that I could display photos. The other tablet options were just as good on the display as the IPAD.
I can also directly import the RAW files from my camera into the IPAD. Can’t edit the photos with anything beyone the absolute basics, and I won’t anyway. The add-on photo was required to directly read my camera SD cards. I wish that they had a CF option as one of my cameras is CF only.
There are some annoyances, such having to use Itunes to delete folders with photos. Also sub folders are not supported. So say I have a folder called Football, and several subfolders under that on my PC, the process of transferring them to the IPAD just creates one folder with all the pictures from the sub folders combined into that single folder.
I wavered between the 64 gig model or the 32 gig model. I got the 64 gig model, WIFI only, no 3G. Turns out the IPAD is very effecient at storing photos and is doing some sort of compression. I loaded 10,000 photos to the device and still had 45 gig left out of the original 64 gig.
So I decided to transfer some music. All my stuff is high bit rate. There is an option in ITunes to convert high bit rate to AAC 128K. I let the system do that. That really slows down the transfer process. To transfer 2500 songs took almost three hours. Maybe it was the Manilow stuff that slowed it down (Oh Mandy!).
Should be “the other tablet options were just NOT as good….”.
Some sort of reserve heating system makes sense. We have an old tiled stove that takes meter-long pieces of wood (I usually put 2-3 split pieces in at once, and they burn 4-5 hours), and the stove stays warm for another 4-5 hours afterwards. Kind of an odd thing to find in a 20th century house, but we’re told it was installed during WWII, because the family couldn’t get any heating oil. It looks something like this
Even with no emergency, I feed it every evening, so that we have a nice, warm breakfast the next morning. Everyone in the family appreciates that on chilly winter days.
Makes you wonder what the hell other companies are doing when Apple can be out there with the best display for so long with no competition. Is Steve Jobs the ONLY businessman on the planet who understands people want a tablet–just like you did?
In my video recording, we usually have 5 or 6 lawyers in most of the sessions, and at least half now have an iPad AND a recent Blackberry. I say recent Blackberry, because a year ago, we got terrible interference from Blackberries being on in the same room, but Blackberries that are under a year old cause no interference. Same with iPhones–recent iPhones cause no interference, while those over a year or so old, cause dramatic noises.
There was a wood stove similar to the one Brad linked to, on the upper-level of our son’s Berlin house. It looks like the affair on the right half, but the tiles were black. He installed several more throughout the house, and used them to cut down on the natural gas bills. However, all tallied, the amount of time he spent chopping wood for them was not trivial.
That’s what chainsaws and hydraulic splitters are for.
He’s got a chainsaw. A nice Stihl we bought for him. No hydraulic splitter, though.
Well, this is scary. I have never given Amazon–or anyone else–information about my Facebook account (which I seldom use). But just after I ordered something from Amazon, it asked if I wanted to post an announcement of what I ordered to my Facebook account. Shockingly, the information it had about my Facebook account was correct. Now if it did not get the information from me, how did they get it?
Now if it did not get the information from me, how did they get it?
Probably from cookes left behind by FB. Used the information to access your FB account.
I thought–from repeatedly being told this throughout the years by those who want you to think cookies are harmless–that it is not possible for one website to reach into the cookies of another. Apparently not so?
Chuck wrote:
“However, all tallied, the amount of time he spent chopping wood for them was not trivial.”
I’m surprised that the environmental police even allow wood fires there. Down here it’s legal, and people have them, but the greenies frown upon them. And it’s getting harder and harder to get the wood.
(I love wood fires, and will probably make having one a condition of purchase for my next home.)
Actually, I think there is probably a large benign history of wood burning in Europe, which makes it much more popular than in the US. If you are looking to buy a wood burning stove, over half the alternatives are imported from Europe. My relatives and friends in Europe did not all have central heating until the 1970’s, whereas I knew no one in the US who did not have central heating when I entered grade school in the 1950’s. Even though it may have been coal-fired, central heating was pretty much universal before WWII, except in the poorest regions of the country.
There is not much wood burning in apartments in Berlin, but in houses, I would say that nearly half of those around us (in the former East) had at least one wood burning stove. Neighbors on all but one side had one.
In fact, burning trash from building sites in bonfires is quite common. The house immediately to our north had several huge bonfires over the 2 to 3 years that house was renovated from a villa (very large house) to apartments. Since everyone is charged for trash to be hauled away by weight, it was cheaper to haul away ashes than the alternative.
We have seen the so-called Eastern Coyote hereabouts several times over the last few years and they are large beasts. They don’t seem to fear dogs or humans so much as disdain them and take a contemptuous wide berth accordingly. Them, corvids and cockroaches will inherit the Earth.
We had a fox that occasionally got through our backyard fence in Berlin. He was a beauty. And every bit as big as our 2 Goldens. Only showed up at sunrise or sunset. Every time I ran for the camera, he was gone when I got back.
That warnt an actual fox, Chuck; that was Loki, the Trickster. Shape-shifter. Sneaky bugger. Even if you HAD gotten a picture, the film wouldn’t have developed.
“I’m surprised that the environmental police even allow wood fires there. Down here it’s legal, and people have them, but the greenies frown upon them.”
Europe is pretty schizophrenic on this topic. We are required to replace our oil heating system next year, because it generates too much pollution. Our heater is 20 years old, but in excellent shape, so any improvement with a new system will be marginal at best. However, there is no restriction on wood fires, and we burn around 5 cords of wood every winter.
Diesel engines and wood fires both produce fine particulate pollution (carbon particles), which are bad. Tractors and trucks are required to have expensive particle filters, but fireplaces and wood stoves are not.
The greenies aren’t upset by wood-fired heating, because wood comes from trees, which regrow – they regard wood-burning as CO2 neutral. Of course, one could argue the same thing for coal or oil – it only requires a somewhat longer time perspective – but coal and oil are the penultimate evil (nuclear, of course, being the ultimate evil). Pretty strange. But the eco-types are rarely known for their consistent logic.
Well, your greenies aren’t as bad as here, and, apparently, suppliers are having to go further and further afield to get wood for Canberra people to burn. I don’t like the smell of smoke when I walk in the evening here in winter, but I’d love a wood fire.
“I thought–from repeatedly being told this throughout the years by those who want you to think cookies are harmless–that it is not possible for one website to reach into the cookies of another. Apparently not so?”
Sorry, I meant to answer this earlier. You are basically correct, however…there is always a “however”. It is entirely possible that facebook offers an API to Amazon. When you visit Amazon, Amazon asks Facebook “hey, does this guy have any FB cookies?” Facebook look, reads their cookies, and sends the info back to Amazon.
This would be a typical cross-marketing deal, whereby both Amazon and Facebook figure they are getting an advantage from the other company’s customers.
It’s also possible that Chuck was the victim of flash cookies.
I not only meant to reply to Chuck’s question, I thought I had.
Flash cookies would be my first guess. They don’t get purged when you flush regular cookies, and aren’t even listed if you view them. What you want to do is search for “chrome delete flash cookies” or whatever and get an add-on to block, monitor, and delete them. “Better Privacy” is a good Firefox add-on. Supposedly some browsers will have the ability built in soon; I don’t know the schedule for that.
The second possibility, as brad mentioned, is for two sites to have an agreement to share cookie information.
A third possibility is web bugs, those 1×1-pixel transparent images that don’t display anything but let hosts know who’s been where.
There’s little you can do about #2 if they do it right, because Amazon isn’t reading the Facebook cookies, Facebook is, and then Facebook sends the info back to Amazon. About the only thing you can do is flush your cookies very regularly and block or delete Flash cookies. Similar for web bugs. Unless you block images by default, or at least monitor what’s getting loaded in each page, there’s not much you can do to keep Facebook from finding out that you were on Amazon’s home page.
And that doesn’t even address any other methods there might be for accomplishing the same goal.
I don’t know how they are doing it, but now I am getting several sites that quote to me my Facebook friends who have ‘liked’ their site. My concern is that they are doing this on MY computer, and not at their end.
I know exactly as much as I want to about Facebook – which is to say, nothing – but I recall a report about how many or most people who had set themselves up there were far more exposed than they believed. If I recall correctly a lot of it revolved around features and defaults changing on a regular basis, but members not being in a state of constant review and adjustment to protect themselves anew after each round of changes. You might want to review your settings against whatever advice there is out there for careful users.
Yeah, thanks for the advice, and if you come across anything reputable on security settings for Facebook, I would be interested in the link.
I don’t use it much, but have decided that not using it is cutting off my nose to spite my face. With my kids having used it from the time it first came out as a gathering place for college students, they now put everything on Facebook, including all their pictures, and other info about their lives. Same with other people in my life — a former secretary said she would use only Facebook to announce the health of her father, who was on his deathbed not long ago. My high school class recently started a Facebook page, and they have ‘found’ more lost classmates since doing that, than all other methods they have employed combined, since we graduated in the mid-’60’s.
It is kind of like software licensing. I did not want the change from ownership to licensing, but are you going to not use computers to avoid that?