Working from home today due to the snow on the ground. I was all excited to drag the snowblower out of the garage, point it at the driveway, and be done in 20 minutes, but it died when it hit the slushy ice at the edge of the road. All attempts to restart it failed, because the pullrope feels like it’s bound inside the drum. Did the engine seize? Who knows.
Sadly, after 20 years of loyal service, my surplus combat boots have sprung a leak. The sole of the left boot is cracked open to the point where my foot got very cold and very wet this morning on my way in to work. Actually, I was going in to a farewell breakfast for a colleague, so my normal commute was extended by a 6-block walk to the harbor through puddles of mushy snow, and on our return I began to notice the leak. I’m not entirely broken up about it, though—these boots are better suited for dry weather anyway, because they have lousy soles for winter grip (read: none) so I only wore them about 1/2 of the year anyway. My hiking boots, which date back to 2000 or so, are literally falling apart at the seams, so the timetable for wet weather footwear has now been moved up dramatically.
Mr. Scout stopped by on Friday and, among other things, got the upstairs bathroom ready for lights, cooked us a delicious dinner of coq au vin, and helped me bottle the american amber that’s been bubbling in the basement. The gravity reading we took was a lot higher than we’d been expecting, so it may be that the beer got infected, which would suck.
Pressing on, we added sugar and bottled two full cases, figuring it will be extra-sweet when it’s ready.
Saturday, our electrician neighbor knocked at 9 and we got started working on the remainder of the electrical projects both upstairs and down. There’s a newer, larger subpanel on the first floor with correct breakers for the office, working cans in the ceiling, a heater mounted in the bathroom, outlets on the chimney wall, and 3-way wiring at each end of the room. I also added insulation in the wall gaps and down under the threshold of the outside door. Upstairs, we got the wiring run to the bathroom, cans in the ceiling, a run for the 3-way switches, holes cut for the sink outlets, and runs for the floor heater and bathroom fan. This evening he’s going to stop back out to fish a wire through the living room ceiling for a fan before we close everything off. Once I know that’s going in, I’m scheduling the drywall delivery and installation.
Update: All of September and October 2003 is entered into WordPress. Next up is August.
Lights, wires, and heater are installed in the side room. We still have to run a line out to the living room for a ceiling fan, but other than that it’s ready for drywall.
Good news! Our electrician will be at the house at 8:30 AM tomorrow morning to get things wrapped up. We’re shooting to get the downstairs wiring finished and the upstairs under way (enough to finally install insulation and keep the house warm).
There was a woman who peeked out from behind the curtain of a room below the sign, checking up on what I was doing. To tell the truth, it spooked me out a little bit.
Here’s a great little post on the BP about tire size equivalents. Currently I’m running a set of 32×11.5R15 BF Goodrich Mud Terrains, but I’d like to set them aside for a smoother road-going tread at some point. It looks like 16″ tires are more plentiful, so the first thing I’d need is a set of four rims to mount tires on. I’d been led to believe I would need something like an LT315/70R15, but the BP thread is saying a 265/75R16 would work on a 16″ rim and sit at the same height as a 32″. Which would mean that a set of four Dunlop Radial Rovers (the brand I preferred on Chewbacca) would be about $118/tire.
The WaPo did a very interesting article on the Christian homeschool movement and some of the underlying ideology behind it. I was surprised to learn how integral they were to the adoption of homeschooling as an alternative to public education but not shocked to hear how xenophobic and isolationist their doctrine is.
Over decades, they have eroded state regulations, ensuring that parents who home-school face little oversight in much of the country. More recently, they have inflamed the nation’s culture wars, fueling attacks on public-school lessons about race and gender with the politically potent language of “parental rights.”
The article follows a family who began to question their fundamentalist beliefs and sent their daughter to public school, only to find it wasn’t full of satanic child molesters, as they’d been told.
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation: How to Enable Advanced Data Protection on iOS, and why you should. I’d like to set this up among all of the devices we have here, but we run a lot of older gear that won’t be covered under this seup—and the idea that if I do enable this, we’ll lose some functionality on things like the Apple TV or this old laptop doesn’t thrill me.
Andy Baio has made many amazing things for the internet, one of which is/was called Belong.io, which was a tool using the Twitter API to scrape interesting links from the feeds of a bunch of interesting people daily. With Phony Stark blowing up the service and charging for the API, he’s shut the whole thing down:
Truth be told, it was already dying as those interesting people slowed down their Twitter usage, or left entirely in the wake of Elon Musk’s acquisition and a series of decisions that summarily ruined it as a platform for creative experimentation.
bummer.
The Washington Post did a deep dive of the dataset used to train popular AI models like ChatGPT, and as you might expect, the big websites got crawled heavily. Interestingly, IdiotCentral here didn’t show up at all, but billdugan.com ranks 1,078,227th.
Songslikex is supposed to be a tool to suggest other songs you might like based on something you suggest. I’ve put in a couple of slightly off-center suggestions and it’s returned a list of songs that were OK, but I don’t know that I’d put them all in the same category. I don’t know how they’re developing their list, but I guess it’s OK.
