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Non-car stuff (for a change)
Jul. 3rd, 2018 08:05 pmRecently, I've been frequenting a store called 2nd & Charles. They sell a mix of new and used books and media, mostly used. I'm guessing the "2nd" is a reference to "second-hand". The selection at each store depends almost entirely on what people trade in/sell, so one store to the next is going to be wildly different. While they do have anime and manga, I'm finding that most of what I'm buying there are music CDs. This place is selling them for $4-5, on average. Outliers on either side are as low as $1 or as high as $10, but even on the upper end, it's made buying large amounts of music at once feasible. Albums that used to be outside the reach of justification (liking something but not enough to pay $15-20 for it), are now viable. If the price is something like $1 or 2 for something I never heard of, then it's worth taking a chance on. For comparison, buying the digital versions from itunes/Amazon typically comes out to $10 per album. What do I do with them when I get them home? Enter them into my Libib account, then rip the CDs to my computer.
I think I fixed my main computer? The one I spent a couple grand on back in 2013? I've narrowed down the root cause to either a flaky hard drive or a flaky expansion card. It went from repeatable:fail to repeatable:success. Time will tell. I still have a few experiments to try before narrowing it down further, but at least the computer is usable now. I kinda wish I figured it out before buying a new video card and a new power supply for it. At least I can use those in other systems.
There are about 8 people in my immediate department at work, and my manager gave the ok on letting 6 of us (myself included) take off this week. Of the 2 remaining, one just started a few months ago and doesn't have much PTO saved up, and the other already has all of his PTO usage planned out for the rest of the year, every last hour. Because of where July 4th is during the week, it seems like everyone in the plant is taking that week off anyway.
Otakon is coming up. Would you believe I didn't get a hotel room for it, nor do I plan to? If one of my friends wants to share their room to knock some costs down, then maybe I'll go in, but this year I'm perfectly ok with commuting (driving most of the way and taking Metro into DC). Honestly, at this point I would much rather put the money towards another trip to somewhere. I have a whole other bunch of things to say about anime conventions in general in a future post.
Back in 2012, I had a fasting blood test done, and the results were that my triglycerides were so high my blood was effectively Type Bacon, and I was on the border of pre-diabetic. So I lost some weight, cut out soft drinks, and started to take a harder look at what I was eating. The fruits of this labor are that my triglycerides are much lower. Still on the high side, but more reasonable. Plus I'm no longer pre-diabetic, that's back to normal. I feel the difference too; my clothes fit a bit better and I have a bit more energy. So, I seem to have found my personal tipping point and wisely backed off from it. That doesn't mean I'll start drinking soda again. I'm ok with leaving that behind. At my peak, I was chugging about 4-6 cans per day. I think if I tried drinking that much in one day now, I'd probably throw up.
Beaming music from my computer to various areas of the house is proving tricky. In the trailer, the biggest obstacle was sheer distance (single row of rooms, almost 70' long, outside the range of most bluetooth devices). With the house, the rooms are closer together but the building material is much denser, so bluetooth signals fall short again. I tried using an older ipod touch as something of a remote for it; that didn't work because the application that was supposed to do that was no longer available for a device that old. What I ended up doing was getting a Sonos, which connects via wi-fi. Wi-fi signals have more "throw" to them. That took some finagling to get it to work directly with Windows anyway, but I did get it to work, which is the important part.
After I emptied out the storage unit last October, my basement looks like that warehouse at the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark". I admit I have a lot of stuff, more than I should. I could probably get rid of a substantial amount of it. For example, I have a couple boxes of documents that are due for a revisit, and I always find something that can go every time I dig through them. The trick is getting around to doing it. The easiest thing to do is nothing, until that's not an option.
The cleaning up, the music harvesting, and the efforts to create what is essentially an in-house radio station all tie together. I found out a long time ago that when music is playing, I'm more productive. Especially when it's set to play random songs. Between the CD harvesting and the Comiket doujin music harvesting, my main music library is well over 50k tracks. In fact, sometimes that gets things started. Maybe not reliably, but there is a connection.
It's toasty outside, up in the 90s. My air conditioning is set to come on in the upper 70s, and I've let it go as high as 80. I'm ok with that. I know most of the world uses metric, but F is more granular, more human-centric for things felt directly by people, like ambient temperatures. It's been described as a percentage of hot. 0%: Not hot at all. 20%: Too low to be detected. 50%: Kinda chilly but not awfully so. 70%: Warm, ideal to most people. 85%: Tolerably hot. 100%: Completely hot. 115%: Over-hot. -40% hot: There's a deficit of hot, and this will take hot out of you if you're not careful. That said, water freezes at about 1/3-hot, and boils at a bit over 2X-hot. A comfy environment for most clothes-wearing folk is between 2/3 and 3/4-hot; cool enough to let us shed excess heat without losing too much. Wardrobe-minimalists will likely feel fine at 4/5 to 9/10-hot. The scale is based on normal body temperature, which is almost exactly Completely Hot. When talking about things like melting points of metals, which are often up in the hundreds or thousands of degrees, that's more abstract to human senses, so Celsius is more appropriate.
Aren't all bubblebaths analog?
I think I fixed my main computer? The one I spent a couple grand on back in 2013? I've narrowed down the root cause to either a flaky hard drive or a flaky expansion card. It went from repeatable:fail to repeatable:success. Time will tell. I still have a few experiments to try before narrowing it down further, but at least the computer is usable now. I kinda wish I figured it out before buying a new video card and a new power supply for it. At least I can use those in other systems.
There are about 8 people in my immediate department at work, and my manager gave the ok on letting 6 of us (myself included) take off this week. Of the 2 remaining, one just started a few months ago and doesn't have much PTO saved up, and the other already has all of his PTO usage planned out for the rest of the year, every last hour. Because of where July 4th is during the week, it seems like everyone in the plant is taking that week off anyway.
Otakon is coming up. Would you believe I didn't get a hotel room for it, nor do I plan to? If one of my friends wants to share their room to knock some costs down, then maybe I'll go in, but this year I'm perfectly ok with commuting (driving most of the way and taking Metro into DC). Honestly, at this point I would much rather put the money towards another trip to somewhere. I have a whole other bunch of things to say about anime conventions in general in a future post.
Back in 2012, I had a fasting blood test done, and the results were that my triglycerides were so high my blood was effectively Type Bacon, and I was on the border of pre-diabetic. So I lost some weight, cut out soft drinks, and started to take a harder look at what I was eating. The fruits of this labor are that my triglycerides are much lower. Still on the high side, but more reasonable. Plus I'm no longer pre-diabetic, that's back to normal. I feel the difference too; my clothes fit a bit better and I have a bit more energy. So, I seem to have found my personal tipping point and wisely backed off from it. That doesn't mean I'll start drinking soda again. I'm ok with leaving that behind. At my peak, I was chugging about 4-6 cans per day. I think if I tried drinking that much in one day now, I'd probably throw up.
Beaming music from my computer to various areas of the house is proving tricky. In the trailer, the biggest obstacle was sheer distance (single row of rooms, almost 70' long, outside the range of most bluetooth devices). With the house, the rooms are closer together but the building material is much denser, so bluetooth signals fall short again. I tried using an older ipod touch as something of a remote for it; that didn't work because the application that was supposed to do that was no longer available for a device that old. What I ended up doing was getting a Sonos, which connects via wi-fi. Wi-fi signals have more "throw" to them. That took some finagling to get it to work directly with Windows anyway, but I did get it to work, which is the important part.
After I emptied out the storage unit last October, my basement looks like that warehouse at the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark". I admit I have a lot of stuff, more than I should. I could probably get rid of a substantial amount of it. For example, I have a couple boxes of documents that are due for a revisit, and I always find something that can go every time I dig through them. The trick is getting around to doing it. The easiest thing to do is nothing, until that's not an option.
The cleaning up, the music harvesting, and the efforts to create what is essentially an in-house radio station all tie together. I found out a long time ago that when music is playing, I'm more productive. Especially when it's set to play random songs. Between the CD harvesting and the Comiket doujin music harvesting, my main music library is well over 50k tracks. In fact, sometimes that gets things started. Maybe not reliably, but there is a connection.
It's toasty outside, up in the 90s. My air conditioning is set to come on in the upper 70s, and I've let it go as high as 80. I'm ok with that. I know most of the world uses metric, but F is more granular, more human-centric for things felt directly by people, like ambient temperatures. It's been described as a percentage of hot. 0%: Not hot at all. 20%: Too low to be detected. 50%: Kinda chilly but not awfully so. 70%: Warm, ideal to most people. 85%: Tolerably hot. 100%: Completely hot. 115%: Over-hot. -40% hot: There's a deficit of hot, and this will take hot out of you if you're not careful. That said, water freezes at about 1/3-hot, and boils at a bit over 2X-hot. A comfy environment for most clothes-wearing folk is between 2/3 and 3/4-hot; cool enough to let us shed excess heat without losing too much. Wardrobe-minimalists will likely feel fine at 4/5 to 9/10-hot. The scale is based on normal body temperature, which is almost exactly Completely Hot. When talking about things like melting points of metals, which are often up in the hundreds or thousands of degrees, that's more abstract to human senses, so Celsius is more appropriate.
Aren't all bubblebaths analog?
