Welcome to Juneteenth. Celebrate this holiday like a black man.
- Go out for cigarettes and never return
- steal someone’s bike
- don’t have a job
- commit a violent crime
Race baiting
Juneteenth
Security
Done Stamp
The closet organizer is done. I secured 3 pieces of 3/4 inch plywood to the wall, spanning 6 studs. They are attached with 52 two and a half inch screws- one screw every 16 inches whenever the plywood crosses a stud.
This is a rail mounted closet organizer. There is a screw through the rail whenever it crosses a stud, and a 1/4×20 elevator screw in between those screws, so that no section of rail is unsupported for more than a foot. Then the system is hung on the rail. I’m fairly certain that will hold it. I painted the plywood to match the wall, and now it looks great. One project complete. Including waiting for parts, it took just over a week.
The camera system should be done tomorrow. That project took 4 days of solid work during the day.
For those asking what cameras I chose, there are two types.
For fixed cameras, I bought five Lorex E842CD cameras. They are 8mp cameras that I placed in the central room of the house, the pool, the rear lanai, over the driveway, and at the front door. I am moving away from smart doorbells because it would have to connect via WiFi, and I want a wired setup.
I also added a PTZ camera. I wanted one with a good optical zoom, so I can see things at distance with clarity. I chose the Amcrest IP8M-2899EW. Like the fixed cameras, it’s also 8mp. It has a full 25x optical and 16x digital zoom. Using this camera, I can read license plates at 200 yards and the expiration sticker on them at 100 yards. It has built in AI that performs facial recognition. Don’t ask me how that works, because I haven’t played with it yet.
All of the cameras are attached to a RAID comprised of three 10tb HDDs inside of a Synology RS1221+ running the Surveillance Station software. That RAID gives me at least 60 days’ recording capacity.
At this point, I will be making minor adjustments to settings and things like that. I also need to learn to use the software, so I will be playing with that some. All in all, I have a good system that allows me to control my data and I won’t have to pay subscription fees to anyone.
The firewall keeps the cameras from connecting to the Internet. The VLAN rules only permit the cameras to talk to the disk station. That protects me from cameras that can be hacked or used to spy on my data.
Installing it required a couple of network changes, but I will lay out my final network in a post coming soon.
People
There It Is
The dumbest thing I have read on the Internet today.
because that’s safe for all of the bystanders- driving a car while firing a pistol out the window trying to hit another car’s tires. Dumbass
Cancel Culture
Buzz
The latest viral video is of a man who takes his young daughters into an Alabama gas station restroom. After ensuring that there are no women inside, he takes them into the women’s restroom. A man then comes in to the bathroom, causing a scene and calls the police. The woman in the background is an employee of the gas station, who doesn’t seem to care that the man and his daughters are in there and is just trying to smooth things over.
It seems that everyone is falling into one of two camps:
- The dad has no business being in the women’s restroom for any reason. Bring your young daughters into the men’s restroom.
- The daughters shouldn’t be exposed to the men’s restroom. It’s fine for the dad to bring them in there.
Me? I don’t care which. His daughters, his parenting style. What I think everyone is missing here is this:
Why in the hell is the male Karen (Darren?) even worried about this to the point of calling the cops and causing a scene? The store employees don’t care, so why does it matter so much to him? He raises such a commotion that the poor little girls are scared and crying. He attempts to gain police sympathy by claiming his wife is waiting to use the restroom with her mother, who is ill and on oxygen.
Guess what? The police have other things to do than deal with Darren’s meltdown. They aren’t going to do shit because no laws have been broken. Why does it matter that his mother in law is on oxygen? Is there some life saving equipment in that restroom that will improve her respiration? Or is Darren an ass who needs a good ass kicking? I’m guess the latter, and he will get what he’s looking for if he keeps getting in people’s faces and pushing them like he does at 1:50 in the video.
The man stayed for police, who confirmed that no law had been broken.
Honestly, the police should respond to find a man that had just received a face full of pepper spray and me with that video demanding charges against him for assault.
When the police did arrive, they pointed out to the dad that it could be perceived as a man trying to perve in the women’s restroom. This is totally different than men wearing dresses hanging out in the women’s restroom because they want everyone else to play along with their delusion. Anyone who says they can’t see the difference is either lying or a complete retard.
Watch the videos and ask which of the two men above would YOU rather have for a neighbor?
Glory Days
Blocking Traffic
One of the things you learn when driving fire trucks is called “protecting the scene.” As the driver of a large piece of fire apparatus, you park it at an angle across the lane of the road where your crew is working and the one adjacent to it. You angle the front tires in such a way that, should the rig get struck, it won’t be pushed into your crew. A Fort Worth fire crew recently demonstrated why this idea is so important. The driver of this fire truck likely saved multiple lives when he did this.
Blog News
Ad Hominems
There are not many rules for posting here that will get your post deleted, for the most part. The biggest thing is “no personal attacks.” I believe in honest discourse, and once a discussion has devolved to ad hominem attacks, the discussion is over. There can be no dialog once people begin attacking one another, rather than their ideas. It’s one of the things that the Internet is really bad at. Someone begins losing on their idea, and so they attack the person instead.
Periodically, someone will do that to me. It’s one of the reasons why I endeavor to keep my name out of things as much as I can. About twice a year, some leftist who gets his panties in a bunch because I disagreed with him on Twitter will come to this site, then begin attacking me. Nothing shows that the discussion is over and you have lost like engaging in attacking the person rather than their ideas. All that can be done at that point is block the person and move on. Nothing further is to be gained by continuing to engage with them.
That happened just this past week. A guy on Twitter that was the subject of a recent post here saw that post and used it as a springboard to attack me personally because he couldn’t defend his own point on its merits. Dialog at that point is over. There is no point in continuing. Just block him and move on. People like that will say “See? He blocked me, I won!” then they will move on, completely missing any self awareness.
It’s one of the reasons why I moderate comments here. Defend your ideas, attack someone else’s ideas. That’s how we learn and grow as humans. Attack the person, and you have just admitted that your ideas are not worthy of defending.
Uncategorized
Amazon
This is the time of year that my Amazon Prime membership comes up for renewal. I’ve been buying from Amazon since 2003. That was back when Amazon only sold books. In fact, I didn’t buy anything BUT books from them until 2005. That was also the year they started offering Prime. Back then, the only benefit to Prime was free two day shipping.
Fast forward to today, and Prime gets you different benefits. The largest thing I have noticed from Amazon lately is how their shipping sucks. I place A LOT of orders with Amazon, I would say that I buy more things from Amazon than I do in brick and mortar stores. In the past 30 days, I have placed 35 orders through them. It’s been so convenient, until recently.
It seems as though something has recently changed there. At least once a week, an order gets lost or arrives late. I will frequently order things with a promised delivery, and it won’t arrive for two weeks, if it arrives at all.
I don’t know what’s going on over there.
Antigun
Reading What You Want to Read
Even people on the supposed gun rights side of things tend to read the Constitution to say what they wished it said, rather than what it plainly says.
Yet the Constitution plainly allows for letters of Marque. When a letter of Marque was issued, called a commission, it would describe the vessel that it had been issued to and its master. The ship was described by the guns mounted. Here is an example:
In other words, the commission didn’t authorize the master and his vessel to mount guns- they were already there. All it did was authorize the master to use the guns already mounted on that vessel to act as a privateer.
So, we know from the historical record that the founders placed no limit on the lethality or number of weapons. Trying to spin it into “well, weapons that can destroy a city aren’t useful for defending a state, so they can be banned” is no different than claiming the 2A only applies to muskets. It’s simply faulty logic.
I would point out that biological weapons have been a thing since about 1500 BC, and would have been known to the founders, yet they didn’t see fit to prohibit them. In fact, the British used biological weapons against the colonies as far back as 1763. They didn’t know how the weapons worked or anything at all about germs, but they knew giving blankets that had been used by smallpox victims to people would cause the recipients to get smallpox.
If only the founders had seen a way for the Constitution to be modified as technology changed. I mean, there is the part in there about amending it. I’m sure the issue here is that you couldn’t get the requisite 2/3 vote of Congress and 3/4 of the states to sign on, especially if Trump were the one pushing for it. After all, the left hates Trump so much that even a proposal to restrict the protection of the Second Amendment to not include nukes would fail to clear the bar for Congress.
That’s the proper way to amend our supreme laws, not by simply declaring that it means something else because we don’t happen to like the result or implications.
Communism
Whiny Commie Kids
These kids today are bitching because they claim we of the older generations had it easy. They claim since rent is $2800/month, things are harder now than they were.
When I first got out of the military I moved to Arkansas. My entire family wound up living in the storeroom of the business I was trying to start. My kids were bathing in a 4 quart ice chest. It sucked. The only job I could find was working for a plant that made aluminum BBQ bits. Not as a maintenance worker or as an electrician, but filing the burrs off of metal castings for $5 per hour.
I decided we couldn’t make a living there, so we moved to Florida. When I got here, the only job I could get was as an electrician for $7.25 an hour. I was working for a company called Palmer electric, and two of us would be tasked with wiring a house (rough in) each day. That’s a lot of work for two people. The company charged the contractor $400 for the job. There was no real profit to be made. That’s why they started using illegals- the companies who were doing that could charge even less and still make money. This was 30+ years ago.
I was making $1000 per month and using that to support a family of four. The rent on our two bedroom apartment was $550 a month. That left us $450 per month for food, utilities, clothes, all of the other expenses. WalMart sold hotdogs $1 per pack, and Mac&Cheese $4 for 4 boxes. Slice 2 hot dogs up and mix with the pasta, and you have 4 dinners for $5. WalMart sold blue jeans for $8. I washed them in Borax to get the oil stains out. That’s how we made the money last.
I managed to get a job as an electrician at the airport, repairing boarding bridges, conveyor belts, and car washes. The pay was better- I was getting $9 an hour. We still struggled, so I got a second job as a part time firefighter.
This extreme poverty was what led me to asking my wife to get a job while the kids were in school. I just couldn’t take being poor and working two jobs while she sat home all day and the kids were in school. She refused, telling me that she married me so she wouldn’t have to work, and we wound up separating. Less than three months after that, I was homeless.
That’s not struggling, according to them. This generation thinks that no one else can possibly know what it’s like to struggle, as they complain about high rent. I can find a dozen apartments for less than $2k. Looking in my old neighborhood, I see a 2BR going for $1600. When you take into account the difference in pay from then, and housing is about the same cost as it was 30 years ago.
The poverty level for a family of 4 was $15,600 per year when all of that happened. I made $15,100 that year with a wife and two kids. The poverty level today for a single person is $15,300 per year and $32,150 for a family of 4. The difference is that Florida’s minimum wage is now $31,200. In other words, it’s EXACTLY the same as it was then. Nothing ever changes.
These people bitch over and over again about how they are poor. Then people who used to be poor come forward and give them perfectly reasonable advice on how to change. Instead of accepting that, they say “things are totally different now, you had it easy” then go back to bitching about how they are poor and it’s all Elon and “capitalism” that has caused it.
Me
Getting What You Ordered
My wife decided that the pantry gets too warm. There isn’t a register in there for air conditioning. We looked at several options, and the one that was easiest and cheapest was to replace the pantry door from a two panel door to a louvered door. Lowes had the doors on sale for $415, so I figured that was the cheapest and best way to go. When I ordered the door, I was asked how I wanted the door cut for hinges. Here is the diagram:
Standing outside of the pantry, the door opens towards you with the hinges on the left and the door handle on your right, just like (4) LHO (Left Hand Out) in the diagram above. It says order right door handing, so that’s what I ordered.
Two days later, I got a text from the manufacturer with a copy of the diagram above, asking me how I wanted the door cut. I responded with “Left Hand Out.” They replied: “Well received. Thank you for the confirmation.”
Two weeks I waited for that door. As soon as it got delivered, I started to put the hinges on the door.
They are cut on the wrong side. The hinges are made for a left hand door. Now Lowes handled it well, telling me that I could return the door to the closest store, or they could schedule a pickup. I am bringing the door back to the store.
Now I have to reorder the door. That’s going to mess up my schedule, because I have a lot going on. I may have to wait to reorder it because I won’t have time to deal with it on July 4th weekend.
There are other things happening that are causing a lot of upheaval in my house right now. I will expand upon them at a later date, but let’s just say that I have a lot of issues on the agenda right now, and I feel like my schedule is filled to capacity.