One year ago today: January 7, 2024, healthy hard work.
Five years ago today: January 7, 2020, facsimile dating?
Nine years ago today: January 7, 2016, pod-snatching.
Random years ago today: January 7, 1980, it’s Chargex to me.
That’s funny it still isn’t cold. But cold enough to stop Antifa, America has fair-weather tioters. I’m getting more familiar with text dictation. I’ve learned it well enough to realize it’s geared toward much sloppier input and a lower mentality than I can manage. The eye-opener is the early entries that I’m getting off the heavily damaged looseleaf sheets from around 1980. This appears to be the only time in my life where it literally seems like yesterday. But then again many of the things I write about appear to be just beginning to make a difference In some people’s lives today. Could they possibly have been that slow to catch on?
What are we up against today? Cold. The sun is not enough to blast through this kind of ground-level arctic air. It’s cold and staying cold. I’d like to work in the shed, but there is no heat out there. Nor can electric heat be installed. This old property has just enough service that it is already maxed out. I never added up the amperage, but like most houses, I doubt everything could be turned on at once without something popping. I made a big grits casserole with extra cheese. I may bake an apple pie (not from scratch) later, but for now I’m in the back bedroom with the floor heaters, working up the gumption to run the new overhead heater cable.
It’s barely up to 60°F out there by early afternoon. Experience tells by back not to start running electrical cable, but the upcoming week’s weather report is clear. Get that heater going or freeze, metaphorically, I mean. The birds are as lively as they are well fed. Take their example, get on some warm clothes and run that cable. I cancel Derry Down last evening to get as much done as I did. Otherwise, it’s a week confined to my room where I have three space heaters. They hog limited floor space and would be better used in the bathroom or kitchen, which have never been heated in this place.
Okay, the picture above tipped you off that I got the wiring run in. The connection is temporary and we know how often such things become permanent. Well, not this one, I found the only wire I had was 12/3 and this circuit only requires 12/2. I need that wire for my shop vac. But it’s cold now so I used the 12/3 and you can see the cable up in the attic. I have not been up there in over a year. I testing the wiring to see why the attic lights don’t work, it’s some connection on the far west side. This is plenty of exercise for me, so the lights wait for a better day.
I did not install the cable, I just ran it through the walls by the shortest route. This involved three times up and down the ladder. Once to drill the holes, then to run the cable, and when all done, go fetch the trouble light. It was not as bad as I thought as I took it super easy. Four hours, so don’t thing of it as hard labor, rather more like I just saved myself $400.
The Pillars of Creation.
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That breaker box is full. I mean the sub-panel. Part of the reason is every applicance and air-conditioner is on a dedicated circuit. That ate up a lot of slots on the biggest panel I could afford at the time, that’s 50 slots fed by a 60 Amp breaker. That includes 30 Amps to the shed. Never had a problem, as I have to reason to run everything at once. Few places could handle that. This is the view inside the panel box as I feed in the cable and prepare the knockout clamp. This is the box expertly wired by Julian, who I still run across once and a while at the old club. He’s doing well.
We already know it will be mostly politics. The latest crackpot theory is that Trump wants to take over Canada and buy Greenland so he’ll have a secure arctic shipping lane when global warming melts all the ice. That’s actually quite clever, whoever came up with that one. Or how the Antarctic ice that has been capping the volcanoes melts, they will erupt all over. Trump has changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. That guy has learned to play the game. And real sudden like, the Democrats are all about words and history. It says here the largest and fastest growing group of unrepresented Americans are single males. And they are 75% of the homeless.
Festus Tuesday, but today no Festus, just Chester. Another superbly written drama with soap opera overtones. The widow of a man Matt kills in self-defense tries to get Matt but meets with woe. A half-hour show stretched into an hour. Lots of sub-plots as she even threatens to kill Kitty, so everybody got a bit part this time. Good thing I brought extra coffee (yes, I bring my own). Back in the warm, almost too warm, back room, I’ve planned for mostly a week indoors. This was not all that possible in the past, meaning the previous year and before. But now I’m ready to settle more than ever before. There’s plenty to do.
Here is the overhead in operation. You can’t feel it but you can see the pilot light. Like all overheads, it will heat the top half of the room unless you arrange for circulation. No prob, I have at least one fan in every room.
ADDENDUM
This voice-dictation is not working well for me. It really isn’t as advanced as I’d hoped. It’s the same feature I did not like about Dragon Naturally Speaking. They gear it down to include mouth-breathers, lispers, foreign accents, and like some people I know, break up big words into trite single-syllable expressions. It took hours to train it to accept intelligent speech that still required extensive proof-reading and tedious corrections. Nonetheless, I concede that this could be the future of my writing. For the past ten years, I get a recurring numbness and a clicking in the joints of my typing fingers. It isn’t serious but these things never cure themselves.
I suppose I’ll get it and I have plenty of material to practice on. Right now, I cannot get it to recognize the end of sentences and it does not capitalize the new sentence. These are setting and I’ll be wise to learn them. I have noticed so many other publications these days are voiced and it shows. I hope to avoid that trap without yet knowing how. It reminds me of the testing my company did with voice recognition Back in the late 80s. I would have reported the results at the time but I’ll repeat them here.
It was DNS that they tried, and it did work well enough dash—except for the social factor. You see most clerks at the company (and the company was 80% clerks) did not comprehend that there was a difference between what they typed and how they spoke. When their spoken words were displayed back to them it revealed how boring they were. While I thought it was a joke and excellent therapy the company had to take it pretty seriously. It was hilarious as we had some of the bitchiest women in the office outright accusing the software of misquoting them. You know who you are, Joan. And as usual with a big corporation, rather than letting the people themselves choose if they wanted to use the software, they canceled it equally for everybody.
