Category: *heh*

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Fun, Fun, Fun (’til My Daddy Takes the T-Bird Away… )

Well, maybe not that kind of fun, but not bad, nonetheless.

The re-roofing of twc central (RW) is progressing. Minor setback. Make a short story long(er):

Installing metal panels over the existing asphalt shingles: use 1″x4″ purlins over the shingles, screwed into the deck and joists below, metal panels installed on the purlins.

OK, no biggie, except… 1x4s at local hardware-cum-mini-lumber yard, or even at Lowes: WTF?!? That much?!? Nuh-uh, baby. Further away than local hardware-cum-mini-lumber yard store but closer than Lowes “fell off the back of a truck lumber yard”: reasonable, but… The store was way low on 1x4s but had a pot load of 10′ 2x4s for $2 each. Rip ’em down the middle? Nominal 1x4s. Close enough. Bought a passel of ’em; brought ’em home and began ripping ’em up.

Table saw died. *sigh* OK, replaced table saw (much faster than repairing the old one, although I have that in my hip pocket for a later mini-project: repair and sell) and began ripping again. Smooth move. I’m still under the cost of 1x4s at Lowes (let alone the “cat’s back-riding” local hardware-cum-mini-lumber yard) and have replaced a slowly-decaying power tool.

Still to go: installing the safety anchors (which I will be leaving on the roof permanently), the purlins and then the steel. Working on the first two on that list today, until the heat drives me off the roof.

The most fun thing in all this, so far, is that I’ve not done anything quite this physically demanding for the better part of two decades, and while I have the typical muscle aches–and my constant “Olde Pharte’s joint aches, etc.–to contend with, so far the pain’s all of the good kind: I can actually feel the good I’m doing myself. Like it.

Most UNfun thing so far: the buckets of sweat. Oh, it’s not all that bad in some ways, but having a puddle literally pour out of my sunglasses onto some work I’m doing is annoying, although at least that clears the puddle of sweat out of my field of vision. *heh* Playing in the attic (to replace a gas vent that needed replacing before the roofing went on) was interesting–like being in a low-ceilinged, stuffy sauna. Temps outside were 106F and in the attic? On fire, man. Going back into the unconditioned, ambient temp, garage from the attic? Felt like air conditioning. Chilly, dude.

As is Tradition for men in my family for carpentry or mechanicking work (going back as far as my paternal great-grandfather, at least), I have already offered a Blood Sacrifice to the Handyman Spirit. Yeh, yeh: I neglected to put my gloves on before moving the steel panels from where they were off-loaded to a better place for beginning to feed them up to the roof. Blood Sacrifice… What does not kill me hurts like the dickens for a while (and then fades into the background of a world of hurt *heh*), then heals… or not (so far all my past “Handyman Spirit Blood Sacrifice” wounds have healed, for various values of “heal” :-)).

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An “F” for Test Design

Lovely Daughter sent me the photo below (modified to obscure personal information of both student and teacher). If I had been grading the pictured test, the student would have been credited with 100% correct answers and the test designer with a big fat zero for amphibolous (equivocal) wording. Just sayin’.

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Consider the DMV (and Some People Think It’s a Good Idea to Have Government Manage Health Care?)

Sarah Hoyt posted yesterday about her experiences with “gummint bureaucrappy” (my neologism applied to her descriptive narrative on bureaucracy), and that prodded one of my two active brain cells to simulate something like life.

Her youngest son had to trek (with Mom, for reasons Hoyt skewers) to the DMV for his license.

“…which will then be mailed to him, in a week or two…”

Good Sharkey, Colonel God! That’s worse than I’ve experienced from any DMV in 40+ years’ experience driving! Most recently, it took me 15 minutes and I walked out with my new license. BUT, it did chap my gizzard that for the VERY FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE, thistime, although I have a 40+ years’ easily-trackable record with four states’ DMVs (20 years in this state alone), THIS time I had to have my birth certificate to “prove” I am me. (WTF? How does my birth certificate prove that I am me, unless the whorls on my baby footprints were to be matched up with my adult footprints?) The funny thing? (No, not “funny ha-ha” but “funny gag-gag”.) My birth certificate was temporarily unavailable (long story), so I sent off for a duplicate (yes, a photostatic duplicate that was as exact a duplicate as can be produced, as comparison with my original later demonstrated). To obtain it I had to include a scanned copy of… my current driver’s license.

So, my (then) current driver’s license was all I needed to obtain a duplicate birth certificate… which was needed to renew that driver’s license.

Complete, absolute and total paper-shuffling B.S.

I draw from this sort of thing–and from Hoyt’s post, to which you can surely add your own examples–an extended lesson:

Governments cannot run without some form of bureaucracy, but since bureaucracies are subject to both Parkinson’s Law and Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy, perhaps that’s an argument for anarchy. *heh* The bureacrappic anarcho-tyranny that is now strangling our economy, castrating our liberty and aiding in stultifying society is certainly the most potent argument against surrendering health care to the “tender mercies” of yet more “gummint bureaucraps”.

Just sayin’

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I Really Need to Get Off My Lazy Butt…

…and check into configuring the Amazon Cloud Player differently, but I figure I can Get Around to That Real Soon Now (or maybe defer it until after the next Procrastinators Anonymous meeting… although I think that’s been postponed again. ;-)). Still, since it randomly selected one of my fav Beethoven symphonies (OK, they’re all favs, but this one is one of the “fav-er-er” ones *heh*), I guess it’s OK for now anyway.

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MSOffice Spellcheck: Terminally Stupid

Try as I might, I canNOT train MSOffice’s spellcheck in the differences between “affect” and “effect”. Dumbass subliterate M$ programmers seem to refuse to allow “effect” to be used as a verb. Of course, most people can’t discern between the two words, but one might think that fixing a spellchecker’s mistakes would be allowable for a user to effect.

(Yet another reason why I generally prefer OpenOffice/LibreOffice, although I have come to prefer and migrate back to Outlook 2010 from the “open[er/ish]” Thunderbird mail client.)

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Oh, Well…

Since the materials list to re-roof our home come in at roughly half what I had feared (that’s the danger of physically going to the manufacturer’s plant and personally getting a bid for materials *heh*), it looks like the roofing project is on for this summer.

Oh, well. At least I get to buy some cool tools and equipment to make the job go faster/safer. ILIWAPCT, don’t you?

Looks like it’s time to start rounding up the crew… 😉

I Love It When A Plan Comes Together. 🙂

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*sigh* This Is What Happens When People Interfere with Evolution

If it weren’t for people interfering with evolution, tomorrow could be a Much Better Day with many, many thousands of people who ought to be living in “Assisted Computing Facilities” (“Here, dearie, let me make that mouse click FOR you… “) having locked themselves out of Internet access via their own stupidity. But no, the dumbasses HAD to warn ’em… *grumble, grumble, gripe, complain*

Internet blackout looms for thousands: What you need to know

Dumbasses! Just think of the bandwidth NOT freed up because of warnings like this!

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Running Lat(er)

*heh* So “Spring Cleaning” got out of hand and has run on into “Summer Cleanup” with bags of clothes and unused furniture making their way to charity and boxes of “stuff” still being sorted with discoveries of tools, electronic equipment, as-yet unread books and scads of other stuff floating to the surface out of storage areas to be sorted into Keep-Give Away-Toss piles. Oh, and meanwhile tons of lil (and some not so little) landscaping/yard jobs that’ve been *cough* “deferred” for some time resulting in more summer sun than I’ve seen for a few years… and bunches of home made charcoal, etc.

But it’s kinda fun to turn up lil gems like this from time-to-time:

Of course, I don’t really use the mouse pad attachment–or some clumsy wired mouse–with the device, but the picture is otherwise a decent representation.

Beats the socks off the other labeling measures we’ve been taking. The thing’s been packed away for more than a decade, unused–never used! (Ordered it just before a major “event” in our lives and just never got around to using it. *shrugs* Casio is still selling the thing and has even updated the software for 64-bit Windows.)

What with all the “lost” tools I now have to integrate with some tools gleaned from a barter deal earlier this summer, the garage cleanup is also looking more and more urgent. *heh*

Need to get all this sorted out before things cool down enough to put on a new roof and paint the siding, though. Now those lil chores should be loads of fun!

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I Just Hate It When This Happens

In a blogpost critiquing the easily mocked Eric Alterman’s assertion that conservatives are largely unsuccessful in penetrating the domains of academia and journalism because they “lack professionalism” the author sums up with this statement:

Just a reminder, when you tax socialists : you’ll get less of them.

In one short sentence two glaring punctuation errors, one orthography error and one misused word leap off the page to assault my eyes. The comma should be a colon; the space after “socialists” is a glaring orthography error; the colon should be a comma and “less” should be “fewer”.

But then, “professional” journalists, who supposedly have editors checking their work, often write prose as bad as that, so it doesn’t affect the post’s argument as badly as it otherwise might.

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Preparing for TEOTWAWKI

Yeh, the dreaded “TEOTWAWKI“. *meh* It could be as simple an ending as NO MORE COFFEE!!!

While that may seem a simple thing, it’s really much, much worse than a Zombie Apocalypse or Nuclear Winter, either of which can be handily survived with the application of enough COFFEE!! (Well, and beer, but I’m not going there right now.)

So, several BIG freezers paired with an adequate power generation method is a must. Oh, and loads and loads and loads (and LOADS) of coffee beans in vacuum sealed bags (with oxygen absorbers included).

But. Unless one really likes “cowboy coffee” or its equivalent, or has a nice French press, coffee filters will be a Very Good Thing to have on hand. In truckloads. Yeh, yeh, I know all about those metal mesh filters. Fuggetaboutit. Just not good enough. Besides, coffee filters are useful for tons of things, so having as much coffee filter stock as toilet paper stock (oh, wait–you are hoarding toilet paper, aren’t you? Why, after TEOTWAWKI, it’ll be the new “gold standard” in “money”. Think about it) when TEOTWAWKI hits might be a Very Good Idea.

Of course, then one would need a vault of some kind to store these riches against the slavering hoards of coffeeheads who’ve been turned into zombies by caffeine deprivation. And then there’re the alligators in the moat and the guard cheetahs to remember to stock feed for and the pillboxes with computer-run 7.62 mm GAU-17/A gatling guns and the…

Nothing’s too much in protecting one’s coffee supplies.

 

 

 

 

TEOTWAWKI: The end of the world as we know it