Video by Howard County REACT
We drove through this area hours before everything was swept away. I don’t know how they’re going to be able to rebuild it all.
I really don’t have much to update here. Peer Pressure has been getting regular exercise each weekend and running like a champ, if not a little rich. I had 20 free minutes last weekend and was able to get a bunch of vise grips on the seat belt bolts in the bed so that I could loosen and spin them 180˚ so that they’d be easier for Finn to grab. I did loosen the bolts on the Tuffy console to shift it forward but it didn’t budge. The bolts are long enough that there’s no adjustment possible, so I’m going to need to drill three new holes in the bottom of the console to get it to move. This will allow for the rear seat to fold and tumble easily.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
Satan’s Hairy Armpit is upon us, with temperatures in the mid 100’s, and all of our air conditioners are cranking. Jen asked me to haul them all outside and clean them out earlier in the summer, and I’m glad she did; they were all disgusting inside, full of black yuck and gunk in the bottom. I disassembled each, sprayed them with mildew killer, hosed them out, and sat them to dry in the sunlight. Now they’re keeping us cool without spraying our lungs full of tuberculosis as we sleep.
I’m considering taking out a home equity line of credit before the election, as I don’t think the new bathroom will be completed without it. We can’t seem to get any traction going in there, and now that I’m not freelancing as much as I used to, I don’t have extra cash appearing magically to throw at it. I have no idea what the markets will do if either candidate wins (but I can guess what will happen if Trump is elected) so I think it’s time to get a fixed APR locked in before everything goes in the shitter.
I’ve been batch processing all of my digital photos from the last 10 years from camera RAW format to JPG, so that I can back them up to Amazon Photo. We get the storage free through Prime, and even though I’ve got two backups of my photos (one in the basement and one in my desk at the office) I’d like to have a third somewhere else. Amazon Photo doesn’t take RAW files, so I set up a simple batch action to open, process, save, and close them into a single folder, which then gets uploaded en masse. I tried finding a script that weeded out any JPG files (why open and resave them?) to filter out everything but what I wanted, but found the documentation poor and once again bonked my head on the low ceiling of my Javascript abilities. So, I gave up and relied on the base batch processor to take care of 2014 and 2013, and being OK with the fact that it’s saving them all at a lower quality for the sake of size.
An awesome shot of Frederick Road, down the street from us, in 1963 and now, via RetroBaltimore, the site I linked to last month.
This week’s big tech news is that Yahoo sold itself to Verizon for 4.8 billion. What does this mean for Flickr, where about 90% of the photos posted here live? Yahoo had 20 years to sort itself out and couldn’t manage that. Most likely Verizon will find a way to fuck it up good. Guess I’d better start planning for a migration…
In the end, the exploitation of anti-government sentiment by Republican leaders, and the active efforts on their part to make all government look corrupt and illegitimate, reached its logical conclusion. The Republican political establishment looked no less corrupt, weak, and illegitimate than the Democratic one, and the appeal of a rank outsider became greater.
Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann do a great job of analyzing the overall Republican strategy of the last 30 years, and how it begat Trump as their candidate.
Amazon just delivered this huge tome to the house: the International Scout Encyclopedia, co-written by the owner of Super Scout Specialists, the preeminent IH Light Line dealer. I’ve skimmed the first chapter so far, and it’s a trove of amazing pictures, history, and trivia.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
It’s so great to see the Descendents covered on NPR; I hate to be the hipster that says “I knew that band when…”, but I had Enjoy! and Milo Goes to College on vinyl when I was fifteen.