I've been vaguely following Tesla since the original Roadster came out in 2008. I never was too excited about it until this friend of mine got one and I got to ride in it. Wow!
I thought that the blind spot warning display (as above) was worth the price of admission.
I rented a Model Y from Hertz for my birthday last year:
It had an even updated version of the software I had seen before. I just got 220v installed in the garage here and was rubbing my hands until I can get one.
Then this news story came out last week ... to no response at all from Tesla.
That's enough of Tesla for me.
I put $100 down on my next car a while back. Check the video below for details on this one.
This is a dust mite:
But this winter I started another one, lasting for a couple of months and ongoing.
My go-to fix for any runny nose problem has been
I visited my "primary care team" and got diagnosed with "rhinitis" (a sinus problem that they don't know the cause of) ... and got supplied with (1) Claritin (works a bit for 3 hours tops) ... was offered Flonase, but major risk factor was nosebleeds so no thanks. Then was prescribed an antibiotic with no extra exam to find out if the sinus problem was bacterial or what ... I took a course of them; no difference.
Finally got onto the Modern Nose Clinic in Bellevue WA, which (a) did a CT Scan of my nose (pretty clear, just a little snurfling) and scheduled an allergy test for the next week.
I got the allergy test, where they put these plastic grids of slightly sharp delivery blobs of allergen into your arms.
I got my allergy report today, and despite a little technology glitch getting the report to me, I got results that didn't (mostly) surprise me:
Also remove any throw pillows, Teddy Bears, etc. from your bedroom:
And no more dust mites so you can breathe freely!
I generally haven't needed medical care (except ophthamology and dentistry), so it didn't seem to make much difference whether I signed up for an HMO or a PPO ...
It doesn't make a difference until you need it ... several months ago I came down with a non-life-threatening but very annoying set of symptoms and needed to get a referral from my HMO.
This was delayed for 10 days here, 10 days there, etc., with my condition worsening every day .. Finally I had a provider call me to cancel an appointment because the referral hadn't come in yet. In desperation I finally said "what if I pay cash?" She said, OK, let me get that number for you .. it turned out to be ... $274.
Since one of the incentive for signing up with an HMO is one of cost (HMO free, PPO $100 to $200 per month) ... I chose the free version, but to undo the couple of months' delay built into the HMO system, how much would I have paid? $2000? $3000? It's hard to measure, but easily something like that.
Just a warning to anyone considering this choice ...
We are on our second recent printer ... the first one was the underwhelming Epson Ecotank 2850:
It sort of worked ... stopped printing and needed to be restarted every time it ran out of paper, scan wouldn't work across the network at all reliably (I may have gotten this to sort of work once on the Macintosh) ... generally a disappointment.
I fortunately got the scan to work on my Linux machine ... more about this one later.
We ordered a "real" printer ... a Brother HL3290CDW ..
This is a newer version of one we used pretty hard for 5 years: MFCsomethingCDW it uses a 4-drum toner system that took a bit more effort than the Epson to get working but works reliably on printing with none of the glitches of the Epson.
But! Scanning from this one to the Macintosh (standard Mac System Preferences) doesn't work either!
This one also works with Linux to scan, but I remember now that there was this "control center" software for the Mac that worked but had a terrible UI and I couldn't expect my nontech wife to use it as she's the mac user left in play ...
But now there's a new one listed: Brother iPrint&Scan ... looks as though it's had a better UI team than the computer programmers that had control of the last one:
This should make my wife be able to scan happily (I hope!)
I just read this book:
You thought Donald Trump and company were bad? During World War I, the Woodrow Wilson administration and its allies ran roughshod over the U.S. Constitution and the rights of U.S. Citizens.
For example this guy expressed opposition to World War I in public:
 |
| Eugene V. Debs, American Socialist Political Leader |
He was charged under the Espionage Act and imprisoned for 5+ years .. just for expressing his opinion!
The IWW, a union movement, was brutally suppressed, its members tarred and feathered:
and in many cases even murdered!
All of this was the same impulse that showed itself most recently here in the Trump Administration and its acolytes, especially on January 6, 2021:
It can happen again! Don't forget to vote!
I just unplugged my helium miner ... the price crash continued:
I made a total of $17.22 over the 8.5 months I had my miner running ... And then yesterday I turned off T-mobile (which the miner was the last piece of equipment using (see my comparison posted recently) )
Then my new wallet (that I set up yesterday when prompted by the helium app) with the exciting $17.22 in it ... went back to 0!
Apparently the miner has to be UP for this to show up ... also the helium app showed the miner UP even though it was unplugged!
So: I give up on this: total loss:
I have had a few health problems the past few months, including SIBO ... one of the ways of dealing with this is to reduce carbs by as much as you can stand ... I started with the Fast Tract diet, which has been helpful and started a 3-month experiment the first of December with the full Carnivore Diet ...
Since my wife wasn't interested in joining me on this, I wound up cooking ... which I discovered I don't like. I started by cooking burgers and steaks on our outdoor propane grill, but that required watching closely (so the burgers, especially, didn't catch on fire, but steaks too) ... frozen burgers (from Costco) take about 10 minutes on the propane grill, plus time for it to warm up and a bit of time for it to burn off the grease after the cooking is done. Steaks (the way I cook them) take 15 or 16 minutes on the grill.
I tried ButcherBox, but (a) one of their packages of bacon was bad, their frozen burgers were in one package so stuck together that I had to thaw them in the fridge first. And their burgers were about 6 times as expensive as Costco's.
So I quit Butcherbox and standardized on Costco frozen burgers with cheese. Costco got a D from some consumer organization on buying beef without checking on its antibiotic use. Shawn Baker says that antibiotics are out of the cattle's system at the time of slaughter ... but he's also an anti-vax advocate But their "grass fed" burgers, which I decided to trust, say "grass-fed, no antibiotics."
So I ate pretty much nothing but these frozen burgers with cheese ... and I got an air fryer for Christmas (actually Santa came early for this one). This cooks burgers in only 6 minutes, with maybe 2 minutes warm up.
My lovely wife couldn't stand the smell ... when in ketosis, my breath and body odor became intolerable to her ... one Redditor said the smell was akin to nail-polish remover.
So every third day now instead of my normal every day, instead of a Chomp and cheese or ham and cheese "breakfast" (really just a morning snack to get a little fat with my vitamin D) I have
I posted last year about my T-mobile internet service and competitors I was considering. It turned out I was wrong; there was a better alternative out there ... it's pretty new on the market and I wasn't looking for it.
My problems with T-mobile got to be bad enough that I started looking seriously at alternatives. Basically the speed would drop from Very Fast to Just Barely several times during the day. Rebooting its router usually (but not always) helped. Also its DNS was continually overloaded/slow.
I looked again at Xfinity, and others ... finally I noticed ads on a new service from Verizon, which I had ditched for cell phone service in 2003 over late "you have voice mail" prompts ... but their new service for Internet looked worth a try: $50 bucks per month, just like T-mobile.
So I signed up (since voicemail wouldn't be involved this time), leaving my T-mobile router up at the same time.
The upshot: Verizon is better. In fact, it's been almost perfect ... I've just seen one five-second drop out when I happened to be watching one day, and it's plenty fast:
Remember 1981?
 |
| One of the most advanced computers from 1981 |
The Internet was just coming to life at a few universities. The main communication tool we had back then was the (landline) telephone. These days the phones are mobile, but if the system is still from the 1980s or even the 1990s then phone calls are still the primary tool.
Southwest Airlines had its technical debt come home to roost last week, its brittle scheduling systems unable to cope with the bomb cyclone that scrambled air travel across the U.S. last week.
I have had the experience of being on hold for Way Too Long waiting to talk to an airline (or bank employee or medical scheduler) but the Southwest employees themselves have were left on hold for hours trying just to tell the management where they wound up.
This debacle is costing Southwest millions of dollars not to mention loss of an immeasurably valuable business asset they’ve built up over the years: loyalty and affection from the legions of satisfied customers they have had over the decades. Last week a lot of it went up in smoke:
