REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

In the garden, and RAIN!!!!

POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Tuesday, November 1, 2022 17:55
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Tuesday, December 3, 2019 2:38 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Managed to put up the Xmas lights ... no roof-work for me, tho! It's all ground-level!

While I was out there I too saw a couple of termites fluttering around. I think of their wing arrangement as "X" wing; its very unique. Anyway, where there are two there are more. I'm going to need to figure out where they're coming from.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

I'd nuke a BILLION PEOPLE if it would save the other 7 billion from living under Putin. Hell, I might go all the way to the last 100 people on Earth to keep this planet from being under fascist rule.- WISHIMAY

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Tuesday, December 3, 2019 3:26 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Oh btw SIX I talked to hubby. His problem was a little different- he was trying to install linux AND Windows OSs on different partitions on an all-in-one originally loaded with Windows, so you could have a multi-OS bootup. Long story short Windows would not allow a multi OS bootup, so he had to clobber Windows and load linux with a bootable CD drive and create the system that way.



There actually is a way to do it, even if you have Windows already installed. It's probably even easier to do today than when I would have done it which was probably 4 or 5 years ago (don't ask me to remember the details of anything then).

I know that Windows didn't allow you to do it, but Linux is cool like that. I can't remember if I was able to do it using a bootable USB of Linux, or if I had to take out the hard drive and re-partition it on another computer with Linux to get the GRUB boot to work.

Actually, now that I've learned so much about command line partitioning in Windows, I would be able to shrink the main partition and create one that would be ready for the Linux multi boot. But that's where my knowledge ends. I'd have to do my research to figure out the rest. What I do know is that the Windows 10 system is leaps and bounds above its predecessors in regards to partitioning. I was able to do things with 10 that I always had to use 3rd party software to accomplish, if it was even possible to begin with.



I kind of hate starting from scratch these days. It's been a long time since the last time I did it for myself, since Windows 10 is much more stable than any OS I've used before.

I'm not going to say that I'm regretting reinstalling it tonight, but I'm using the absolute most up-to-date version of it now since I made the bootable media off of their site, and let me tell you it's bloated as shit compared to the release I was using before. Everything is slow as hell, which shouldn't happen after a clean install. I dunno... maybe it's downloading and installing a ton of updates behind the scenes and that's what is taking up all of the resources now.

But I've tried installing both Firefox and the NVIDIA drivers twice and they failed very late in the process saying that the installer can't finish because another installer is open. I might have to let it just sit overnight and try in the morning.


Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Tuesday, December 3, 2019 3:28 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by 1KIKI:
CHKDSK - all the way to win95 ??



They still use it today.

If you use the command line you can run a CHKDSK C: /F command, but that's the same as right clicking on the drive in explorer, going to Properties/Tools and doing the disk checking there. If it's your main drive, it requires a reboot and it will fix it Pre-OS boot.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Tuesday, December 3, 2019 3:29 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Managed to put up the Xmas lights ... no roof-work for me, tho! It's all ground-level!

While I was out there I too saw a couple of termites fluttering around. I think of their wing arrangement as "X" wing; its very unique. Anyway, where there are two there are more. I'm going to need to figure out where they're coming from.




It occurs to me that maybe my difficulty identifying termites comes from the fact that I've never actually seen termites out in the wild. Thankfully.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Tuesday, December 3, 2019 4:52 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Sweeeeeeet.

Yeah. I was right. Windows was doing a shit ton of updating behind the scenes. That's why everything was running so slow. They're so inconspicuous and unobtrusive about it these days that I wasn't even sure until I just recently saw an alert pop up saying that the system needed to reboot for a specific change (changes?) to take effect.

In the mean time, I still haven't been able to install the NVIDIA drivers, but I've installed about 20 other programs that I would regularly use. I'm still in the process of doing a few more.

Tip to the wise... do a little research about trimming bloatware, altering some settings to make your performance better and ESPECIALLY how to disable everything from accessing your camera or your mic. Not only are these things set on to default in Win10 extremely invasive, but they're somewhat resource intensive as well. Even though Windows 10 is completely usable as a desktop OS, it behaves very much like a tablet/smartphone and is just itching to give any app/program you install access to your camera or mic whenever they want it. Better yet, put a piece of tape over the camera and completely disable the camera and mic altogether. I might actually find out where the mic is now that everything is still exposed in the back and just remove it altogether. This has never been a problem on a system that I build since I don't put mics or cameras in them, but in the prebuilt systems like this they all have 'em.



Before I install anything that I wouldn't regularly use but I'd still like back on the machine as well as anything that came from "dubious" sources, I'm going to make sure the updates are all finished and I've got everything that I know I want on there.

Then I'm going to make two clones of the profile in case one gets jacked up, and after that I'm going to make a backup disk image of this disk so I can easily migrate it to another hard drive in the future if this one ever breaks or if I decide to upgrade to a 7200RPM drive and eek out a little more performance out of it.




It seems to be flying right now. Best performance I've seen out of this thing since I've owned it.


Now if I can install that program for my project and get everything to work right like it did before, I'll be a happy camper.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Tuesday, December 3, 2019 6:33 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Soooooooo much to install lol.

It's a real good opportunity to cut the crap out though.

Before doing this I went through my add and remove programs, my start menu and installed applications lists and pared down the list. Now that I'm re-installing everything I'm choosing to leave a few more out that I don't think I'll ever really use and about 3 times as many that I'm just sticking a pin in for now. No reason to bog down the machine with anything that's not going to get any use in the next year or two just to put some ticks on a checklist.

It's late. Or it's early. I'm up way past my bedtime doing this stuff.

Still trying to get it to the point that I can clone it while I sleep, but I think that might have to wait until tomorrow. Not sure if I can stay awake long enough to get it all done.

At least I finally got the NVIDIA driver installed.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Tuesday, December 3, 2019 5:03 PM

BRENDA


Quote:

Originally posted by 1KIKI:
I remember you don't like snow, Brenda. But I don't remember, or I never knew, if you always get at least some snow accumulation every year, or if it takes an exceptionally bad year for that.

Anyway - I hope the snow holds off for a long time after that dusting! And no accumulation!



Snow can be a maybe on the Lower Mainland. That is why when people want snow they head up to the ski hills for it. Places like Grouse Mountain which is just about an hour's drive from Vancouver, or further up the coast to places like Squamish or the Valley and from there just keep going North.

Worst winter was 2years ago when all that snow was where I am and I fell twice.

I hope it holds off and with all the rain forecasted for this week might just be a green Christmas. On the flipside though it is early December.

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Tuesday, December 3, 2019 6:36 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


Yeah Brenda, now I remember you saying you fell.

Personally, when it comes to winter, I can take the cold, but the snow makes everything 10x more miserable, difficult, and hazardous. My last few years up in the NE, for whatever reason, I developed a phobia about falling. I'd be creeping along wherever - through the parking lot, on the sidewalk ... while other people were just striding along. I just had such a fear of stepping through the snow onto a hidden patch of slick ice and going down.

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Tuesday, December 3, 2019 9:57 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


I'm surprised it's green up there now, Brenda.

I think we set a record for how much of the US was covered in show around Thanksgiving. Luckily, that seemed to miss us.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Tuesday, December 3, 2019 10:32 PM

BRENDA


Quote:

Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Yeah Brenda, now I remember you saying you fell.

Personally, when it comes to winter, I can take the cold, but the snow makes everything 10x more miserable, difficult, and hazardous. My last few years up in the NE, for whatever reason, I developed a phobia about falling. I'd be creeping along wherever - through the parking lot, on the sidewalk ... while other people were just striding along. I just had such a fear of stepping through the snow onto a hidden patch of slick ice and going down.



I hear you Kiki. I not much on the cold now that I am older. I've certain spots on my body that were injured at some point that the cold hits them and I am stiff and sore. Also having a thyroid condition doesn't help either. With that being slow I feel the cold more.

Black ice is dangerous which is why I kept the cane that I bought. I have to do a bit of walking to get to my workplace and though it might be fine where I am living now, getting there won't be. People don't want to clear off their sidewalks and seem to fail to realize that if someone falls around their property they can be sued. That is an issue I am constantly in the winter bringing up with my boss and her husband.

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Tuesday, December 3, 2019 10:42 PM

BRENDA


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I'm surprised it's green up there now, Brenda.

I think we set a record for how much of the US was covered in show around Thanksgiving. Luckily, that seemed to miss us.

Do Right, Be Right. :)



It's green on the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. The rest of the country not so much. Alberta eastward is white.

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Wednesday, December 4, 2019 12:23 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


How you liking your first winter in your new place? :)

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Wednesday, December 4, 2019 12:37 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Got my hard drive enclosure shipped a day early. Say what you will about Amazon, but they certainly are quick...



As I had expected, the manufacturer's migration program still could not detect the drive. I'm assuming that this is because of the old BIOS, but it could be a number of other things as well. I don't have any USB3.0 slots on the computer, so maybe it just doesn't work on USB2.0 either.

Oh well. Nifty little case here with an on/off switch. So I got a blazing fast 250GB external SSD now that will allow me to do a bunch of cool things when I get around to them, and will serve as remote storage that I could even use as my own "cloud" and make my own crappy little website with until then.





The partition/backup software is AWESOME. It's by a company called AEOMI.

It turns out that I still want to make more tweaks, some controller configs on some things and install a few more programs before I make my "official" backup for this system, but it will be a breeze when I'm ready to do it and even with my limited resources it's up to doing the task in the background without slowing down youtube streaming. And now that I already have it backed up once, if anything goes terribly wrong from now until then I can just make another clone. :)

Because I'm using the free version, I have to make the clone from scratch every time. If I paid 50 bucks for the paid version, I would be able to do it much quicker since it would do a scan and only change the differences in the clone image.


I had about 210GB used on a 320GB drive before cloning, and it made a compressed file around 135GB... so the compression is an added bonus.


But the kicker, and why I think this is so awesome?

Once the cloning process was finished, I have an option in the sofware to "View the Backup in Explorer".

Now, I thought that was just going to allow me to simply look at the file names and verify that the program had actually done both partitions of the drive. Nope...

The program will actually mount whatever partitions are in the image to Virtual Drives that you can not only view, but you can actually run any of the data that are in them too! It's a bit slower to run the stuff because of the compression, especially on my old system. It reminds me of using Doublespace back in the days of Windows 3.1. But unlike those days, even a computer as slow as mine has a ton of memory compared to the 90's, so once they're loaded into memory I can run music or videos off of that Virtual Drive backup as if it were an actual hard drive. Unbelievable.



This computer is running so good now compared to before. For about a year I hadn't been able to do things like plug a controller into it to play games, and once it had been left on a day or so I had to constantly kill my internet and bring it back up since it was running so slow. All of those problems are gone now. No more device conflicts. And the drive I've got in there now passes all the SMART tests with no errors.

I was also able to figure out how to correctly configure my project with a new OS install, and everything works as it did when I had originally set it up. This was the single reason that I hadn't done anything about this until now, and now I know exactly how to set it up again at any time in the future without losing any of my work. (Not only that, but now I can install it on my brother's PC's as well, as I know they're going to get a lot of enjoyment out of it).

It was a lot of work getting there, but now that it's all backed up it's work I won't ever have to do again with that computer until it dies. It's also the roadmap to how I'm going to set up any new computers I put together in the future. I learned a lot. :)

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Wednesday, December 4, 2019 1:36 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


That's awesome, SIX! You're an incredibly quick learner.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

I'd nuke a BILLION PEOPLE if it would save the other 7 billion from living under Putin. Hell, I might go all the way to the last 100 people on Earth to keep this planet from being under fascist rule.- WISHIMAY

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Wednesday, December 4, 2019 2:26 AM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


So, nothing to do with anything Brenda, but as I was thinking about it, I remembered that in my experience, one way to help keep a positive outlook in winter is to stay toasty and dry.

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Wednesday, December 4, 2019 2:57 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
That's awesome, SIX! You're an incredibly quick learner.



I give all the credit the cheap coffee at ALDI.

All joking aside, I was never much for learning from a set curriculum. When I'm interested in something or I'm looking at getting out of paying for expensive repairs or having somebody else do something I could do, look out.

Now if I could only translate that into getting a decent job...






I'm going through old programs I've saved over the years now... There's a ton of them, and more than a few that were cracked and had viruses just waiting to be triggered. Boring stuff, but I'm trying to declutter my virtual hoard. :)

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Wednesday, December 4, 2019 2:59 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by 1KIKI:
So, nothing to do with anything Brenda, but as I was thinking about it, I remembered that in my experience, one way to help keep a positive outlook in winter is to stay toasty and dry.



Dry is easy here now that I've waterproofed the house...

Toasty is an issue though.

I've got to settle for "well... at least I'm not freezing my balls off".

meh... I'm used to it.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Wednesday, December 4, 2019 12:40 PM

BRENDA


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
How you liking your first winter in your new place? :)

Do Right, Be Right. :)



I'm liking it just fine. I'm nice and cosy. So nice not to have to worry about getting things done. :)

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Wednesday, December 4, 2019 12:42 PM

BRENDA


Quote:

Originally posted by 1KIKI:
So, nothing to do with anything Brenda, but as I was thinking about it, I remembered that in my experience, one way to help keep a positive outlook in winter is to stay toasty and dry.



I'll be able to do that. But still have a bit of the winter blues. Got hit last night but dealt with it.

Christmas cards starting to come in and I am mailing a few.

Christmas tree waiting to go up and I will.

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Wednesday, December 4, 2019 12:43 PM

BRENDA


Any road got things to do today. Gotta get moving in a bit. Later peeps.

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Wednesday, December 4, 2019 2:22 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


Well - harrumph!

``::``::``::``::``::``::``::``::``::``::``::``::``::``::``::``::``::``::``::``::``::``::``::``::``

As noisy as the rain was, as long as it fell, I only got about 1.25" in my ball-jar rain gauge. The last storm wasn't nearly as noisy, but surreptitiously dropped over 4" of rain. I suspect these drops in this storm were larger, hence noisier, but spaced far apart.


Sadly, no more rain is predicted as even a possibility till the end of the month. I keep thinking that this year is going to be like all the other drought years, where we started out with good rain in November, and some in early December, and then, nothing. But I keep hoping not. ETA: for comparison, to be AT normal we need and inch of rain a week for 4 months straight.


And Climate Stations STILL hasn't posted an official rain total for this rainy season!

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Wednesday, December 4, 2019 5:23 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Over here, they were predicting about 1/2" of rain and just looking out the window it looks like we got 1.5". Yipee!!

*****
Scratch that last amount. I went out to walk the dog and didn't get past the corner when it started to POUR. That wasn't supposed to happen! May as well give puppy-wuppy a bath, she's wet already!

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

I'd nuke a BILLION PEOPLE if it would save the other 7 billion from living under Putin. Hell, I might go all the way to the last 100 people on Earth to keep this planet from being under fascist rule.- WISHIMAY

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Wednesday, December 4, 2019 6:21 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


Apropos of nothing - I was running errands and once again I'm struck by the foliage colors this time of year.

As an explanation, SoCal supports both broadleaf evergreen and broadleaf deciduous trees. So there are many shades of broadleaf evergreen enlivened by the rain - from the deep, deep forest green of the coast live oak to the bright lime-green new leaves of the hollyleaf cherry. Then there's the deciduous fall colors, like the deep, deep maroon leaves of some varieties of crape myrtles, the maple-syrup-brown leaves of the California sycamore, the bright scarlet-orange of some crape myrtles and liquidambar, through the bright gold and pale ghostly glowing yellow of the ginkgo biloba.

Wow. What colors!

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Wednesday, December 4, 2019 7:49 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Trees just beginning to turn here.

I wonder why the city doesn't plant coast live oak as a street tree. But I do love the colors of liquid amber!

Busy busy days for me. I took a five day vacation during and after Thanksgiving but it's back in the saddle for me!

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

I'd nuke a BILLION PEOPLE if it would save the other 7 billion from living under Putin. Hell, I might go all the way to the last 100 people on Earth to keep this planet from being under fascist rule.- WISHIMAY

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Wednesday, December 4, 2019 9:30 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Bummer.....

I got a little too ambitious with my PC project.

There's really no way to "clone" a user profile in Win10. That is to say, I'm sure there is, but that's a bit above my paygrade and common advise is to not even attempt it and to just start a 2nd and 3rd regular profile and build it from the ground up, otherwise, you're looking for trouble.

So I found a program that would do it...

And since I doubt anybody reading this here will ever attempt this for any reason in their lives, I'm not going to mention the company name, but it doesn't work.

It doesn't "clone" a profile. It "migrates" a profile. Once that process is done, it rebuilds your new profile after a reboot with all the old stuff and when you login to the original profile you find that it is essentially started from scratch and does the regular welcome screen stuff and you're at square one.

That alone would have just been an annoyance, since I would have resigned myself to having to build the other two from scratch... BUT IT BROKE THE PROFILE IN THE MIGRATION!!!! Some of the programs I have require an activation key. Now, when I try to re-enter that key it says that the the profile doesn't have access to that registry key which holds the flag....



On top of that, I can't even do a Windows Restore to an earlier point, because apparently one or more of the Services I turned off for smoother Windows operation on a slow PC shut down the hyberfile.sys and all active Restore features, so there isn't a Restore file to use.

Shit.


Oh well...

I guess I'm going to get a much faster than anticipated crash course in my backup software. Just used it to create a bootable flashdrive with a rudimentary version of Win10 on it that started the backup process immediately after it finished loading. Seems easy enough, and now I'll mark that USB drive and throw it in my case with all my other OS boot disks.



I shouldn't have lost too much work here. 2/3rds of my work yesterday was just organizing things, and a lot of that was on this drive, but I knew enough to create a few partitions so I'd only have to frag the main system partition in a case like this.

I won't know exactly how much work I lost until it's finished, but it should just be a few hours of installing stuff that I didn't put on until after the backup was made, re-arranging some Start Menu shortcuts and re-testing that everything works right.



Then I've got to make a few more profiles and set them up from scratch.




Good thing I got everything organized as I went along yesterday.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Wednesday, December 4, 2019 11:32 PM

BRENDA


Well, there was some excitement here earlier. Something set off the fire alarm in the building where I live. Board that is set up in the lobby said it was in the parkade. Fire department arrived and went to check on it. Nothing was wrong. Another false alarm.

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Thursday, December 5, 2019 12:27 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Is it raining by you?


I ask because the fire alarm went off a few times for seemingly no reason at a place I used to work at. It was a huge deal because we'd end up with like 8 fire trucks from different cities over nothing and they'd get big fines.

It turns out that there was a leak in the roof that was dripping right on the box going to the alarm system and it tripped it.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, December 5, 2019 12:32 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Sweet. That backup re-installed in less than 15 minutes.

Quite a bit of work that I had to re-do, but I seem to be all caught up to where I was when I finished last night again. Just in the process of starting the backup profiles now.

This gave me a chance to realize that my printer/fax wasn't set up right the first time too. I thought that happened after the botched clone, but it was a problem before the backup. That printer software has always been flaky.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, December 5, 2019 12:08 PM

BRENDA


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Is it raining by you?


I ask because the fire alarm went off a few times for seemingly no reason at a place I used to work at. It was a huge deal because we'd end up with like 8 fire trucks from different cities over nothing and they'd get big fines.

It turns out that there was a leak in the roof that was dripping right on the box going to the alarm system and it tripped it.

Do Right, Be Right. :)



No it wasn't raining last night Six.

This new fire system has been wonky since it was installed. Same thing happened on Tuesday but in the afternoon. I saw the fire trucks as I was leaving my local senior centre. Wondered what happened but didn't know. Someone told me last night as some of the tenants were gathered in the front lobby.

Like I said the firemen checked the parking out and side everything was fine. So, I guess the manager will have to get the fire alarm people in to check their system AGAIN. They were just here a few weeks ago.

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Thursday, December 5, 2019 12:08 PM

BRENDA


Things to do. Later peeps.

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Thursday, December 5, 2019 6:00 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


Well dang, I formally measured the ball-jar rain-gauge and I got only 1.5", pretty exactly. All that noisy rain was a bust.

But I did notice that the mesquite tree leaves have turned a brilliant, vibrant yellow over the last few days.

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Thursday, December 5, 2019 7:00 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Aright.....

I'm almost done with the computer. Aside from the fact that it's not a blazing new unit, it's basically perfect now, and has every single program I use for day to day stuff as well as all of the once I use for my various projects when I get back to them... all of them upgraded to the newest versions.

Just doing some temp file cleanup and running anti-virus/malware one last time, then I'm going to put the shell back on it and run a new drive backup and put it on 3 external drives so I never have to do any of this again.

Well....

At least until I upgrade to a new computer.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, December 5, 2019 11:53 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


"I wonder why the city doesn't plant coast live oak as a street tree."

A lot of people dislike that the coast live oak is a very asymmetrical, gnarled tree.



They want something prettier looking, I guess. And I haven't looked deeply into it, but I think the coast live oak (and perhaps a few other evergreen oaks) are exacting in their retirements, in terms of air space/ soil compaction, watering, and symbiosis. The oaks I have (2 coast live oak quercus agrifolia and the 2 I thought were some kind of scrub oak that also appear to be coast live oak) planted themselves, so I guess they found a good enough spot. HOWEVER, the 5 years of drought, along with the fact that the uphill neighbors weren't watering their property as much - so my plants didn't get the benefit of underground surface water - tested them severely. The coast live oaks do NOT like direct water especially in summer, so keeping them alive was challenging. Their health has been taxed.

Anyway, whenever you see a coast live oak in a human landscape, you see it with TONS of space around it. I suspect they wouldn't do well hemmed in by sidewalks, curbs, landing strips, roads, etc, with direct irrigation that usually sustains public landscaping.

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Friday, December 6, 2019 12:00 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Their root systems might play hell on structural stuff too. After seeing what those maples did up that close to my house, I have to imagine that a lot of planning goes into planting trees these days.

I wouldn't be surprised if insurance companies outright ban certain types of trees being planted around structures, sidewalks, parking lots, etc.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Friday, December 6, 2019 12:25 AM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


Amazingly, the coast live oak next to the house seems respectful of the foundation, even though the tree is nearly 30 years old, 40' tall and having planted itself 5' from the house.

But the ficus trees Los Angeles so innocently planted many years ago ...




FWIW urban foresters have gotten much more savvy about what to plant, where to plant, and how to plant. I had the opportunity to talk briefly with my city's forester. And I'm sure she had better things to do with her time, but I would have loved to have taken her out for a beer and listen to whatever she had to say about trees.


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Friday, December 6, 2019 1:31 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Jesus Christ look at that picture. Makes what happened around my house look tame by comparison. Looks like something out of a Lovecraft novel.

I didn't know for sure that I was right about the insurance thing. I was just making a logical guess.

Yup. I can't imagine that the foresters can just plant whatever they want to plant unless the city is looking to get their insurance plans dropped.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Friday, December 6, 2019 4:08 AM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


Ficus trees are like that. They have very muscular looking roots, Actually, their trunk and branch structure looks muscular as well.


I have a funny story about city trees ... this was just 4 houses west of me. There was a tree planted in the parkway that had a HUGE branch - 4" diameter at the base - that stuck out pretty much sideways from the trunk, over the sidewalk, at around 5' above the sidewalk. Given the diameter of the branch, obviously it had been left growing there for quite some time. All but little kids had to duck when walking down the sidewalk. Anyway, I came home from work just in time to see an ambulance take off from in front of the house. So I asked the owner (source of one of my rescue kittens who had a kitten dumped in his yard) what happened. And apparently, there were a bunch of people walking along the sidewalk, and of course it wasn't wide enough to accommodate everyone across its width, so one guy was walking ahead but kind of turned around to talk to the people behind him. And he walked full-force into the tree branch hanging over the sidewalk, and conked himself out cold. Hence the ambulance trundling him off. Anyway, the tree branch was gone the very next day. I got up pretty early, and it was gone by then.

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Friday, December 6, 2019 4:09 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:

Originally posted by 1KIKI:
"I wonder why the city doesn't plant coast live oak as a street tree."

A lot of people dislike that the coast live oak is a very asymmetrical, gnarled tree.



They want something prettier looking, I guess. And I haven't looked deeply into it, but I think the coast live oak (and perhaps a few other evergreen oaks) are exacting in their retirements, in terms of air space/ soil compaction, watering, and symbiosis. The oaks I have (2 coast live oak quercus agrifolia and the 2 I thought were some kind of scrub oak that also appear to be coast live oak) planted themselves, so I guess they found a good enough spot. HOWEVER, the 5 years of drought, along with the fact that the uphill neighbors weren't watering their property as much - so my plants didn't get the benefit of underground surface water - tested them severely. The coast live oaks do NOT like direct water especially in summer, so keeping them alive was challenging. Their health has been taxed.

Anyway, whenever you see a coast live oak in a human landscape, you see it with TONS of space around it. I suspect they wouldn't do well hemmed in by sidewalks, curbs, landing strips, roads, etc, with direct irrigation that usually sustains public landscaping.

I've seen what I THOUGHT were coast live oaks planted in parkways, in healthy green grass, in a clearly irrigated landscape nestled between sidewalk and street. Maybe I mis-identified the trees.

I will say that my quercus tomentella seems OK with summer water every 2-3 weeks, and just loves the winter rains. However, it has a very odd growth habit, unlike any of the online pictures of its species: it seems to like to make side sprouts into leaders. It's like the axial tip just doesn't want to grow.

Speaking of rain... the "official" rainfall here, as measured by my "rain gage" was 2" onthe nose.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

I'd nuke a BILLION PEOPLE if it would save the other 7 billion from living under Putin. Hell, I might go all the way to the last 100 people on Earth to keep this planet from being under fascist rule.- WISHIMAY

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Friday, December 6, 2019 4:34 AM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

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Friday, December 6, 2019 4:39 AM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


If left to grow naturally, podocarpus possibly could have that same contorted, lumpy, asymmetrical outline up against the sky ... ?


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Friday, December 6, 2019 1:13 PM

BRENDA


Rain today

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Friday, December 6, 2019 6:39 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


So, Signy ... to continue with a conversation from a LONG time ago - there were some conifers that by the photos I thought were cypress, simply because they had multiple leaders (and AFAIK cypress is the only conifer that does that). Did you ever positively identify them? I think I recall you had, but I forget the answer.

And ... leaders produce some kind of auxin the suppresses lateral buds. Maybe there's something in your neighborhood soil that can mess with that, given your oak and those conifers ...

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Friday, December 6, 2019 6:44 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


And today, when I was running errands, I gave away my umbrella to some poor old lady in an electric wheelchair who was riding in the rain. It wasn't supposed to rain today. That's what everyone's been telling me all day long, from the waitresses at the restaurant to the cashiers at all the stores I've been to. (But I have to say Wunderground had it right.) Anyway, I hope I made the day at least a little less miserable for one person.

Between today, sat and sun Wunderground predicts all of a half an inch. Whoopee. /sarcasm

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Friday, December 6, 2019 8:35 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:

Originally posted by 1KIKI:
So, Signy ... to continue with a conversation from a LONG time ago - there were some conifers that by the photos I thought were cypress, simply because they had multiple leaders (and AFAIK cypress is the only conifer that does that). Did you ever positively identify them? I think I recall you had, but I forget the answer.

And ... leaders produce some kind of auxin the suppresses lateral buds. Maybe there's something in your neighborhood soil that can mess with that, given your oak and those conifers ...

The one thing that kept me from IDing them was lack of "cones" either on the tree or ground. I FINALLY found a cone that leads me to think they are cedars. Not sure if Atlas or Lebanon, maybe both.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

I'd nuke a BILLION PEOPLE if it would save the other 7 billion from living under Putin. Hell, I might go all the way to the last 100 people on Earth to keep this planet from being under fascist rule.- WISHIMAY

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Friday, December 6, 2019 9:29 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


Oh yeah, I think cedars do that as well as cypress.

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Friday, December 6, 2019 9:30 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:

Originally posted by 1KIKI:
And today, when I was running errands, I gave away my umbrella to some poor old lady in an electric wheelchair who was riding in the rain. It wasn't supposed to rain today. That's what everyone's been telling me all day long, from the waitresses at the restaurant to the cashiers at all the stores I've been to. (But I have to say Wunderground had it right.) Anyway, I hope I made the day at least a little less miserable for one person.

Between today, sat and sun Wunderground predicts all of a half an inch. Whoopee. /sarcasm

Oh, the poor woman! And good for you!

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

I'd nuke a BILLION PEOPLE if it would save the other 7 billion from living under Putin. Hell, I might go all the way to the last 100 people on Earth to keep this planet from being under fascist rule.- WISHIMAY

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Saturday, December 7, 2019 1:46 PM

BRENDA


Laundry to do.

Also yesterday last of Christmas cards in the mail. Thank goodness.

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Saturday, December 7, 2019 4:33 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Alright...

My computer is flying (it's never going to reach outer space, but relatively speaking it's working better than it ever has).

I created a backup partition on the very same drive that now houses a full backup of the Win10 installation on the C:\ Drive. It won't help me at all if the entire drive fails, but in the case that I ever screw something up royally, introduce tricky malware or I just find that over time it gets slow, it will be easy to frag that setup and re-install it and it will take less than 20 minutes to do so. :)

I've also got the entire hard drive backed up to another external drive using the same program. I may consider automating a weekly or monthly backup for this in the future when I get back to my projects, but I don't want to just leave an external plugged in 24/7 for that purpose and needlessly shorten the life of the drive.

I'm actually considering doing a weekly or monthly backup to the SSD after I get it all hooked up to the router for sharing. The backup would take just a little more than half of the size of the SSD. It would make for extremely fast backup and restore features that work right off the network, but SSDs do have a finite amount of write processes before they fail. I will do more research on this. I might choose just to put static stuff on there that I don't have plans of changing or moving in the future.






Picked up all of my special order stuff today. Thirteen 12' 4 1/4" base board trim, Forty Three 7 1/2' 3 1/4" window and door casings, and Nine rolls of 18' long R-15 insulation.

After I get my rebates and the credit to my card account, all of that will have cost me around 70 bucks. :)



Going to drag in my miter saw and horses tomorrow and start getting ready to put it together. I'll make my cuts first, then paint over the pre-primered boards, then figure out how I'm going to install them. I might see if one of my friends has a brad nailer I could borrow, otherwise I'm going to need an extremely steady hand when installing it.







Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Saturday, December 7, 2019 6:29 PM

BRENDA


Have one more Christmas present to buy and then a couple of more Christmas cards to deliver. Those are to my GP and my chiropractor.

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Sunday, December 8, 2019 3:08 PM

BRENDA


Need to buy a dog and a kitty Christmas presents tomorrow.

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