Modern Vespa

I dug farther when I had a chance, and figured out it was the pic of my late cat's butt that was the culprit.

The PNG was 9.78MB, while the JPG version of the same image was 245kb.

I'm almost positive it was the file size.

I just tested it, and it worked.

Excellent, thanks for the feedback.

Your cat's a Tesla?

I don't even want to think where the charger goes.

Right now he's a small bag of ashes in a box in the living room.

I always thought that his * bore a striking resemblance to the Tesla logo. He seemed to be very proud of it, and always wanted to show us.

As a former GS and GS leader, I can confirm this is how it works.

Hot tip: Store a case of Thin Mints in your freezer during the off season for a bargaining advantage in numerous situations.

Assembled lots of shelving today. The garage style ones that you don't care about putting greasy things on.

Also got some tool chests - the kind with thin slide out draws to arrange things.

Now I've go no excuse to not sort out my crap around the house 🤦‍♂️

As a long time thin mints buyer, I can confirm it's not possible to store them in the freezer. It was hard enough to get them from the front door to the freezer before the pack of vultures my children eat them. Now that they don't go door to door and you have to get them all the way from the grocery store... Nope, not gonna happen.

New garage door in yesterday. New door, rails and conversion to torsion spring. It's an uninsulated steel door so probably 1/4 the weight of the old wooden door. Nice seals all around.

News from down the street this morning quite horrifying, but the substantial silver lining (not to overshadow the tragedy of lost lives of course) being that at least it wasn't between 0630 and 0830, because that would have been hundreds dead easily.

Key Bridge saw 30,000+ vehicles a DAY so to hear only 7 were originally unaccounted for (and at least 2 found alive) is beyond wonderful given the potential alternatives.

Why does a " Tidy Garage" sound like a euphemism ?

Tattoo Chewsday innit.

"Tidy up the garden" is covered by the urban dictionary. Garage however is not.

This is your chance at greatness Bill.

It's the non alcoholic version of the Irish Car Bomb. A glass of root beer with a shot of lemonade dropped in.

Just finished up.

You know that doesn't come off, right?

Henna I hope.

That reminds me of my customer's logo on his planes.

I mean......EVENTUALLY it does.

seamus26,

Nice clean looking garage doors. Same, same, I replaced my old wood doors that came with the house when built. Your are right, they rot and the paint peels. I first replaced the lower panel - then. like you, purchaed new all metal doors - very nice.

Hint, the lower metal panel can rust discolor due to road salt. I wire brush the bottow area lightly and paint it with white Rustoleum. This only happened after three-four years.

You are looking great.

Bob Copeland

armedferret,

I would say you are "All IN" with that tatto.

Bob Copeland

Time to start planning the London/Belgium (Tomorrowland) trip....flights and accommodation booked, but now we get into the details (like whether we rent a car upon arrival and immediately make for Diddly Squat, or do that the following day.....etc).

I just know there's a day at JJ Fox in my future. Again.

Turn the lights off after you leave.

seeing as they haven't built a set of stocks for Sadiq yet, I'd wager the lights are already off.

realised I can hook my phone with the dead screen to my pc like an external monitor + mouse. was then able to unlock it with my mouse and get the couple of things that were not backed up

The new heat pump has arrived!

Many weeks ago, the compressor gave up the ghost on our 30,000BTU/hr (~5kW) outdoor inverter heat pump, depriving us of heat (and in the summer coolth). It was out of warranty, and the cost of paying someone to replace the compressor (just out of my skill/tool inventory range) was nearly the same as buying a brand-new outdoor unit, with warranty, and with enough extra pipework to allow us to move the indoor unit to a more suitable place. Also I can install this new unit myself easily enough, plus I can completely hide the pipework in the walls and attic, thus keeping Mrs jimc happy

The old gas in-the-wall furnace will finally be consigned to the metal recyclers, along with the old dismantled outdoor heat pump.

Dinner.

Is it an Air to Water Heat Pump or Air to Air?

Air to air. I know in the UK they're often air to water, to retrofit into gas boiler/radiator systems, but the main use out here in the US is for cooling in the summer, where several 40C days in a row can be common. These air-air mini-splits heat a space with better efficiency than air-to-water units.

I'd love to put one of these in my UK flat, but I've no means of adding solar panels which would really make the change worthwhile.

I messaged my brothers this morning to see if they would like to join me for lunch at Chowder Ted's today.

Two could and it was arranged to meet at 12:15.

Just as I was ready to head to my scooter for the ride, my wife called to say that she wanted to come too, so the scooter ride was scuttled and we went in the car, with her driving.

A mile from the restaurant, on an open four lane road with a 45 mph speed limit, I noticed a motorcycle police officer on the side and realized that we may have been speeding.

Sarah saw it too and confirmed that she was probably going to get a ticket.

Sure enough, the officer pulled out and followed, pulling us over at the earliest convenient place.

He asked for her license, registration and insurance card.

She had her license and insurance card along with an out of date registration.

He went back to his motorcycle for a while, coming back to tell her that he was not going to give her a ticket, just a warning for speed and not carrying an up to date registration.

That was an unexpected relief.

Bill

It's cold and windy here today. Chowder sounds really good! Inquiring minds want to know... Were you late for your 12:15 lunch or did your wife speed to makeup the time lost being pulled over for speeding? 😂

Opening day!

Go Reds.

email just arrived informing me that my retirement order is finalized and ready for download....

w00t! Congrats!

After taking a break for a couple days and writing something whimsical and fun, I'm back to battling the bots today. There are a lot of them currently swarming MV, from what I believe to be multiple separate actors. Some of them do in fact have a few "tells" that I can use to filter them out.

For a handful of these, I am redirecting them to the whimsical, fun project I was working on a few days ago: an entirely fictitious forum (running right here on this very website) that has an infinite number of articles to scrape.

All of them being entirely randomized lorem ipsum. Infinite lorem ipsum.

This achieves two different goals:
- First, randomized lorem ipsum is computationally easy to generate -- with much less server resources than it takes to render a topic. I can do it without a single database hit.
- Second, it fills the database of the unidentified web scraper with complete garbage. Depending on their level of sophistication, this might actually be a problem. For them.

And that's what's cheering me up today.

Love your work jess. Giving back to them infinite joy - from your end.

The chowder was excellent, as usual, to go along with a grilled cheese.

My comfort meal there.

We were running on time, but she was driving at 62 mph instead of the posted 45 mph.

It is a wide, four lane road where everybody is driving at least 55, but it was still speeding.

After the nice officer let us go, we were only a few minutes from the restaurant and the brothers were waiting outside.

Brother Scott had passed us while we were pulled over and was pleased to hear that we got off with a warning.

Bill

Wearing my cyber security hat, I'm always thrilled to hear someone screwing with the scammers.

The mutations in my blood are down from 0.006 to 0.004. Not bad.

I spent much of yesterday in London with Treppenwitz.

That cheered me up.