October 14, 2025

Yesteryear
One year ago today: October 14, 2024, the pancake attack.
Five years ago today: October 14, 2020, women vote against things.
Nine years ago today: October 14, 2016, the glue rip-off.
Random years ago today: October 14, 1981, I saw the Stones.

           Nothing to report. My hired help did not show up this morning, so I may have a go at that flooring myself. That’s the corner with all the pipes and wiring that I’ve been putting off. It’s the reason I don’t have a kitchen stove yet. But I’m okay living off a hotplate, hey, I was a college student, let’s see, seven years of my life. Mostly part time, but hotplates are your friend. I got the entire area cleared for work with some concrete blocks and sized wooden spacers, shown here. Then he never showed.

           A closer look at that old wiring tells me this is not going to be anywhere near as easy or cheap as I hoped. And that plumbing does not look all that much better. I wonder if leveling the floor won’t be enough to cure a lot of the ills. Recall how all the doors and windows started working when I fixed the back bedroom. My newly repaired level shows that one corner has to be raised up 3-1/2 inches. It does not look that bad, but it is.
           See also picture of the hinge jig where I’m punching the exact spots for the pilot holes. I’ve experience my first problem with the new planer, it sometimes jams with a board half-say through. I’ve double-checked all the settings.

           It’s a coffee and politics type morning, I see Trump moves up the scales. We got a gallery of Democrats trying to blame the shutdown on him, but each passing day is a revelation of how little they are needed. Trump is the master tactician. The more the situation continues, the more people will reject a return to big government, but if the Democrats cave over illegal immigration, they are certifying their own failure at the mid-terms. And to think, before Trump nobody much paid attention to those elections.

           The National Guard has moved into Memphis and the criminals have disappeared. This was one of the test cases. Memphis was the black crime capital of American, beating out Chicago for gang membership and murder stats. You see, the gangs had said they would fight back and kick ass. Instead, they have gone into hiding. Residents are posted on line saying for the first time in years, they don’t hear shooting and squealing tires at night, that they can walk in the streets again. Yep, a lot of the Trump changes are pretty much irreversible.

           NASA is laying off 550 people at their propulsion lab. That’s the famous JPL in California, so that is around 10% of their workforce. Really, despite building all the Mars rovers, they have not done much else for years. The average new car in America just topped $50,000. Tesla is foisting unsold cyber trucks onto SpaceX. NASA is planning to “de-orbit” that joke of a space station in 2030. Does this mean they are finally going to do their proper job of getting to Mars? Of course not. NASA loves flying around in circles doing SFA.

Picture of the day.
Abandoned house, Eddy, TX
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.

           As expected, it was finally revealed that satellite phone data is often unencrypted. Told ya, some researchers (the media won’t dare call them students) in Maryland and California have been using an $800 antenna to snoop on your WiFi searches and US Border Patrol depositions. T-Mobile insists it has “fixed the issue”. I read some of the transmissions, it looks like Python code, one of the worst. Python, like most millennial codes, is just renamed BASIC commands bastardized to read like Martian, with that dismal millennial propensity to abuse punctuation marks. It’s a retard thing, they can punctuate code but not their own sentences.

           Finally we see the ending of “Quick Change”, which critics say was criminally underrated. I don’t get the last scene, I know the detective realizes what happened, but not how. He’s got a house cleaner lady that keeps his place spotless, but then again he pays quite well. Like myself, he used to play the stock market before realizing without insider trading, it’s pretty much zero sum. He won’t touch silver, which overnight traded at $52.99. Somewhere near is a photo of the next circuit I’m building, a small one-transistor pre-amp.

           Just to do it, I cut and built a box in 20 minutes, a pencil box (with sliding lid) for my plastic repair iron. The one that repaired the 4-foot level. The trick is to press hot metal clips into the plastic, then sand it over smooth with a mix of superglue and baking soda. Mind you, this is the largest object I’ve repaired with such a method (using 1-1/2” brad nails) and don’t know how well that is going to last.
I then created possibly the flattest board in local history. Using the messy planer and my digital calipers, I cut the plate for my new planned hinge jig. It is by some margin the most complicated and finely measured gadget

           I’ve made of wood. Adapted from a door hinge model, this one has to fit where it can match of two pairs of cuts, both of which can move, that is, the box and the lid. The jig has to fit inside the box which is deep and the lid which is shallow.

           There also has to be an exact distance from both left and right edges, unless I want to build two idendical jigs. It took some time to plan this out, two hours just to mark where the biggest cut will be. Because of this time constraint, I am going to have to settle for some sloppy cuts as proof of concept. There’s a point after which I should just buy a jig. Turns out the best precision drilling I can do is not with the drill press. It’s too heavy duty. We drill the good stuff by hand.
           The nearby scan of Top Plate B is the result of those long hours—and it is trash, has to be thrown away. Because despite careful measurements, on of the dimension is a “mirror image” of what it has to be. But it solved the clamping problem if I want to do the extra work. For exactitude, the jig should be clamped though for a rough box, it can be hand-held.

ADDENDUM
           No doubt in my mind the local utility bills are designed to confuse the customer. The presentation is insane, with fields like “your last payment” which I suppose helps some dodo types who don’t know they have a balance forward. My bills are not kept here, I go pick them up every six months, and strangely, every May the bill is missing. Then you get a whopper of a bill in June. And we finally know how much it costs to not be here. This is a hard figure to compute unless you are away for two billing cycles, which most people cannot afford.
           The utility cost of not living in this cabin is $95.11 per month. It consists of two electricity bills (the city buys power during peak periods), water, sewer, recycle, solid waste (garbage), and a tax that varies between $6.19 and $8.58 that has never been explained. Since I don’t monitor each bill, I tend to overpay a little each time. Thus, there is no problem if I skip a payment once in a while.
           This means last year, after the Valdosta incident, I was able to skip several bills. So, at some point, my bills were overpaid by between $550 and $841. At this time I am $372.42 over paid. Two other trends are easy to spot from the nature of this and the property tax bill. The provisions and warning indicate they expect most people to pay late. What kind of world is this?

Last Laugh