One year ago today: August 17, 2019, always relevant.
Five years ago today: August 17, 2015, sigh, Planet 107.
Nine years ago today: August 17, 2011, fretless jazz riffs, yawn.
Random years ago today: August 17, 2012, twenty miles through Denver.
The joys of home ownership. The kitchen sink is blocked does not react to chemicals, plunger, or snake. That means under the sink take out the pipes repair. And I can’t leave it until I get back because of a slow leak that requires replacement of the whole assembly. There is no overflow check so it’s time to get dirty. The original pipe is that 1-1/4” cast iron so I hope I am not dealing with interior corrosion. This is the exact section of piping that was slated for replacement when I get to the kitchen renovation. I can see it has been repaired a number of times before I got here. But hey, this place has already paid for itself so creating the mess is the only thing stopping me.
Not wanting to start the day with a pipe wrench, I grabbed my bass and ran through some of the new material I’m putting together. It closely follows the live but disco-like bass lines in the Shania Twain recordings mentioned a lot lately. In the process, I’ve checked a lot of new country, most of it makes for pretty bland stage material. Like rap and blues, most of it sounds alike to me and it also tends to have orchestral arrangements in the background. To duplicate this on stage requires experienced arrangers and I have never met anything like that in Polk.
I don’t suggest many handymen like under-sink repairs. The blog rules say I must report the most important event, and that’s what you get. One big picture that covers the entire morning. Actually, it was not as messy as it looks. The various sections show the standing soapy water that signaled the problem, then some shots of the pipe in stages, not in any order. The most interesting shot is the one showing the crud inside the tube, bottom center. It had no odor, was not drywall dust like it resembles, and clogged a good 15 inches of the piping.
Dumb as it may sound, if I had to guess what it was, I’d say dried sink cleanser. It even had a slight chlorine hint. I took the pressure hose and snake line to the rest of the length to be thorough. Predictably, the old pieces would not fit back in place, so the final shot is black plumbing tape, the stretchy kind that saves many migraines with old plumbing repair. I’ve never had a problem with using this tape, it will surely outlast me in this house.
I did not bother to inspect the compound inside, it’s likely been there since before I arrived, as I’ve never used that sink for anything heavy duty. Total completion time just over two hours, not including clean-up. So I likely saved myself a $500 repair. The happy consequence is I got to inspect the cast iron piping. Same as the bathroom it is in fine shape for its age. This makes life easier when the new counter goes in across the room. To bad it was a temperate day when I should have been outside working on the shed roof but I’m awful fond of running water as a priority.
Obamaland.
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I have been reading some chapters on javascript again. The recent changes Google made to the blog posting procedure has been done largely without regard to how javascript interprets those changes. Thus, I issue ordinary script commands and get back odd results, the most annoying is the amount of blank space that follows paragraph breaks. Google’s ineptitude at this explains why many of my format information is entered manually. Take for instance the date field. The Google system categorizes your blog by adding a date. So why do I duplicate the effort and type in my own date?
Because it is the smartest way to avoid being trapped. If you rely on Google to put in the date it creates a reliance on Google to do the right thing. So it only looks like there are two dates on each blog. One is a Google date, the other is a real date. Knowing that, you decide which one to trust. I’ve taken to reading the script as best I can, its entire purpose as written seems to be to keep the user away from the underlying control codes. Odd, when it is put about that javascript is “client-side”, meaning it is supposed to reside entirely in your computer, relying on the web only for the data to act upon. This raises questions. If it is on my computer, why can’t I find it?
Over this short study, I’ve concluded javascript has the same “rotten” nature as HTML and CSS. Some half-brain starts writing the underlying code without experience or exposure to read programming. I can tell much of it was written without even a flowchart. This always causes obstacles after around 1,800 lines of code. That leaves our muttonhead coder two choices. Start over, taking the chance of just creating another mess, or add ever more code in the form of patches, workarounds, quick fixes, and in the end, succumb to the temptation to make the code appear like it is working. We’ve seen it all before.
You can view this clutter of commands yourself by right-clicking on any web page, then choosing “inspect element”. Don’t fool around in there, but every line of code you see is nothing but piled up attempts to make things work. Even a person who knew the scripting language would have headaches trying to maintain that code. I say again, the solution is to get rid of it all and start over with real programmers. But once things get away on you, that costs too much. You spend the rest of your time issuing upgrades and new versions. Ask MicroSoft.
Ha, so the first sap in the fake Russia hoax goes down—and it is an FBI lawyer. Has my attention since it is so rare these government agencies are held responsible. I call it the tip of the iceberg, that the investigation, if pursued, will begin to peel away the layers of political leftist infiltration, corruption, and cronyism that defined American government since Reagan. The Democrat party is had to have been behind it and the big media has to bury this as deep as they can before that election. I want to see prosecutions and jail time right to the top, and that top is Hillary. Long prison sentences, sufficient so they die in the slammer. What they did was treason and a strong signal has to be sent to the thousands of liberal moles who will escape this time only because what they did falls just slightly short of criminality. The prime perpetrator is a lawyer, so he’s going to sing to save his own skin. Welcome to America.
As the deadline approaches, the antics of the left get zanier and more furious. Look at the mayors of the rioting cities, demanding money instead of police or soldiers. The most hypocritical are the ones saying that the reason their cities have been failing for twenty years is because somebody who just got here is providing enough “leadership”. They have to do something fast or get quashed. The tactics they’ve used against every other opponent don’t have any effect on Trump and the economy has not failed despite their crazy shutdown. In fact, it may result in changes overdue for years. Like spiraling downtown office rents and Mafia-like parking lot monopolies. It does not bother me to see entire districts of vacant commercial properties, to me that’s just payback time under a system that has been making it progressively harder to start a truly new business. The thrust here is that they have to do something big and soon. It can be anything, as long as it is on a national scale. They’ve used the shutdown and the riots to no avail, so what remains. We are taking bets, the top possibilities are listed below, the only condition is it must be blame-able on Trump.
a) another 9/11
b) burst a damn
c) nuclear incident (northeast coast, please.)
Of course, the left prefer more direct methods, but this time assassination would be too obvious.
ADDENDUM
This hasn’t been a great month for making ends meet, I breezed through the entire budget in 11 days. However, this is not the disaster for me that it may seem. It is more a revelation of what other’s must be experiencing. I have a built-in buffer for such situations and statistics tell us most people live payday to payday. That makes sense, my budget allowed for six months of bad conditions, and this is the fifth month since the scamdemic began, call it March 15. That tells me if it had been a real tragedy, I could have made it.
Then, had it been serious, I would not have sunk $2,285 into building materials either, half of it lumber. Now that the shed has radio, I’m getting a steadier diet of politics. Some say the Leftists have played their last hand, threatening to exact revenge on Trump supporters. Did they really say that? Apparently so. Some say this will be a very short election indeed. I’ve shifted some cash into hiding and you probably should also. Got no cash? Then you have not been heeding the good advice dished out free by this good old blog.
Anyway, the topic here is money. There is no easy way any more to send money via mail. I always use money orders and the transit time has gone wild. Gone is next day delivery. I have a tracking system that records everything, including scams of the envelopes before they are mailed. Some items mailed July 27 have just arrived now. My system assigns a date-stamp to each outgoing transaction limited to one per week. In normal times there would be confirmation long before the next mailing. This system has been upset, the other end reports vacant weeks, then a pile arriving in random order. The problem pre-dates the voting fraud scare, this is something wrong in the postal system.
I see now the impetus could be to force all business to be done electronically. Now that the American system has the capability to track every transaction, it’s becomes a simple matter of forcing it to be done on-line or with an end-to-end paper trail. We’ve seen this before, the defense is to set up a working system before the situation gets airtight. New American laws tend to address existing problems and have trouble reaching into the past. Rather than wait to see what’s going on with the post office, devise a way to bypass it. The obvious way is a joint account, not ideal, but allows deposits in either name. This works only, of course, if you have somebody you can trust implicitly.
