Be Absent-Minded and Be Your Own Secret Santa

Should you buy yourself Christmas presents?

When I got out of law school, I was a disgrace. I only owned one pistol! It’s embarrassing to admit it. I owned a Glock I bought in case I had to kill one of my sister’s friends. This is true. I’m not trying to be funny.

She was enraged about something I did to help her, so she threatened to send some male junkie friends to take care of me. I got myself a Glock 22 and put my worries behind me. Fortunately for her low-life friends, none of them ever showed up to test my marksmanship, and I never had to go through the trauma of putting bullets into a human being. After that buy, I let myself down by letting maybe 9 years pass without another pistol purchase.

A Glock 22 is not a .22, by the way.

When I left school, I got myself a graduation gift. I went to Garcia’s National Gun in Little Havana and picked up a Smith & Wesson 686+ 7-shot, 6″ revolver in .357 Magnum. Very nice. Satin stainless with Hogue grips.

I frequented Garcia’s because I had bought into the myth that one should support local gun dealers. I bought several more guns from this place, and every time I showed up, they treated me like a stranger, perhaps because I wasn’t a Cuban. After that, I learned to love Internet shopping.

Yelp says Garcia’s is gone, which is not a surprise. Here is a quotation from a review a lady wrote:

“If you are not a 50+ year old Cuban guy you are invisible to these people. Terrible service. They treat you like you’re not there to spend money. I will take my business elsewhere.”

That is exactly how I felt. I would stand in the store while they talked to their pals en espanol, waiting to for my existence to be noticed so I could give them $700 or $1300 or whatever. It looks like their customer base decided to say, “Hasta la vista, baby.”

I think the revolver is the only present I’ve ever bought myself. I have certainly bought things for myself, but I don’t think I’ve bought myself anything for a special occasion.

Actually, I just remembered one, so I’m wrong. I bought a 2003 Ford Thunderbird and took delivery the day after my birthday. It was a silly, frivolous car, but I really enjoyed it.

I guess that counts. Sort of. I mean, I had to buy some kind of car, and I would have done it even if it had been during a different month.

Okay. It doesn’t count

Rhodah and I went to Singapore recently, and of course, I bought her stuff. She is still catching up from a lifetime of poverty. We bought clothes. We bought a nice Bric’s suitcase. There were other things. She managed to squeeze a big perfume donation out of me while she was on her way to her flight and the duty-free shops.

During our trip, I got myself a Singapore ball cap in the Bugis Street bazaar, and I also got a Levi’s-brand belt because I left my own belt in Florida. The belt does not count. In the airport on the way home, I realized I had nearly nothing to show for my trip, so I spent 22 USD on a Singapore shirt.

In Ireland, I got myself a Dublin hoodie I will never wear. I would have gotten a T-shirt, but the Irish sell incredibly cheap shirts that can’t possibly last a year. In Turkey, I got a hat. In Egypt, nothing.

It’s hard to buy anything in Egypt that is not related to idolatry.

Egypt is not the greatest tourist destination. If you go, stay in a very nice hotel in Cairo and get guides to take you to the sights. Then take a Nile cruise with guides. Then go home. You won’t be able to drive, and there is nothing to do except look at pyramids and temples anyway. See the old stuff and enjoy a cruise. If you limit your trip to these things, you’ll love Egypt. Don’t do anything else.

I feel like getting myself something, but I am not doing well at finding gifts for myself.

When I got the idea of getting myself a present, I immediately thought of a trailer with a gas-powered leaf vacuum on it. That is not a Christmas gift. It’s a tool for yard maintenance. A CNC mill I don’t need would be a good gift. Something I really need so I can do chores would not.

I’m not blowing $8000 on a mill.

I looked at my Amazon lists. They’re full of things I need. There are also things I merely want, but those things are too cheap for Christmas.

I bought myself two Shark vacuums this month. Cordless and corded. Spent over $600. Changed my life. Absolutely worth every penny. Recommended without reservation. But cleaning tools are not gifts. And Rhodah will probably be the one who uses them most.

I feel like I’ve turned into the aunt who used to give me socks.

How about another firearm buy?

The other day I was on the phone, and I saw an unopened flat rate box. I opened it up, and it contained a new Wilson rifle cartridge trimmer. The invoice was from August of 2020. This thing cost me over $130, and I had forgotten I owned it. Obviously, I have not used it. I haven’t fired a gun in maybe 6 months. I have enough ammo supplies backed up to keep me busy for a couple of months. I built a rifle I have not fired yet. I finished it months ago. I probably have 15,000 rounds of .22 ammunition. I don’t think this is the time to buy gun stuff.

Maybe a nice bottle of XO brandy. I barely drink, but a really nice brandy would be pleasant to have on hand. I have not had a really good brandy since before I left Miami.

How about a water-cooled TIG torch? Practicing TIG is no fun when you’re holding a hot torch. A new one would cost a few pennies, but it would encourage me to practice.

I would love to have a Langmuir Arcflat welding table, three feet by four feet. My Northern Tool table is astounding for the money, but it has about half the square footage of a Langmuir. I’m doing a project which is not going to fit on my table. It would hang off the ends and sides of a Langmuir, but I think I could make it work.

It would be great to have a table 6 feet long. You can weld nearly anything on a table like that.

A Langmuir fixturing table 4 feet long would cost more than I want to spend, sadly. It would be $1800, including tax. Cut that figure in thirds, and I might do it.

Like a leaf vaccum, a welding table is useful for necessary jobs, but you can also use one to make fun things like a shooting bench or a mobile base for a big table saw you don’t really need. I don’t think I’d put it in the same class as a leaf vacuum.

I’m going to try to get by without a vacuum. Today I took my giant blower and made a 10-foot-wide pile of leaves at the side of the front yard. I plan to burn them as soon as I can get a permit. In the past, I was determined to move leaves out of the yard before burning them, and that’s why I never got anywhere. Moving them an eighth of a mile to the burn pile is extremely work-intensive. If I am willing to have a black spot in my yard, I should be able to get rid of them without extraordinary effort.

I guess I’ve already bought myself nearly everything that would make a good present. I have a drawer full of nice knives. I have a Ruger RPR with a Vortex Viper scope. I have an ice cream machine with its own compressor. I have a 16″ lathe. Years ago, I got myself musical instruments.

To some men, or women who have a lot of jewelry, this stuff may seem insignificant, especially when spread out over decades, but I don’t live on a grand scale. I drive a Ford Explorer with 60,000 miles on it, and I plan to keep it for 10 more years. I use a cell phone made in 2017. I own a Rolex, but if my late father had not owned it, I would not have one. If I spend $500 on something, I feel like it’s a big deal.

A home waterjet would be nice. Really nice. Let’s see. A Wazer, the best-known small waterjet, would only set me back maybe 12 grand.

Dang it.

How about a plasma table? Let’s see. Over $1500. Geez.

I may as well clean up the brandy snifters.

Trump NFT’s: I Miss Out on the Ground Floor Again

I know virtually nothing about nonfungible tokens, but I wish I had bought a Trump NFT this week. I think they’re hilarious.

If you haven’t heard about these tokens, it’s partly because the big announcement was made on Truth Social, where information goes to die.

For people with even less knowledge than I, if any exist, I will impart the few facts I know. An NFT is a piece of digital currency, so I suppose that means it only exists as a piece of code. A method of authenticating these things has been created, and I won’t tell you what it is because I don’t care enough to find out for myself. My understanding is that if you store your money in NFT’s, you can prevent the IRS from finding out you have it. I’m not sure, though.

I don’t like NFT’s because my feeling is that they can evaporate without notice, leaving you with FN, or fungible nothing.

Stocks can also evaporate, and the dollar can, too, except for dollars made of silver and gold. Most dollars have no physical existence. Only a tiny percentage have been turned into bills and coins. The rest are imaginary, stored as numbers in computers all over the world. I don’t see how that can work, but it’s the truth. The dollar can plummet, but I think it’s less likely to do so than an imaginary coin with a dog’s picture on it.

I don’t know how NFT offerings go. Based on my knowledge of the unfairness of the world, I would guess they go like stock offerings. In a stock offering, a company sells shares to the public, and brokerages see to it that only people who are already rich can buy them. Then the prices skyrocket overnight, and the rest of us get to come in, buy shares, and watch the prices collapse.

A quick scan of the web suggests that nearly all of the people who make money from NFT’s are the ones who create or sell them. That is exactly what I would have predicted. Completely consistent with my view of the world. So probably, there are a few thousand lucky consumers who got rich buying NFT’s before they became trendy, and now the only way to profit is to be in the creation and sales business. And the whole business is propped up by suckers who buy NFT’s that generally don’t work out.

By the time suckers find out about things that make money, the money has usually gotten a lot harder to make.

Sounds like the whole thing eventually becomes a Ponzi scheme.

I’ve probably already said things that aren’t correct, so I guess I’ll stop “explaining.”

This week, Donald Trump (PBUH) issued his own NFT, and it is making leftists boiling mad. Like they weren’t already. I Googled to try to find out what it was and where to get one, but it looks like the leftweb has ganged up to make this information very hard to find. Google “buy Trump NFT,” and believe it or not, you won’t get much useful input at all. If somebody were selling a Hunter Biden NFT or an NFT with Obama’s dog on it, similar Googling would produce useful results immediately, so I’m not sure what’s going on.

If Obama issued an NFT with a grainy picture of his butt on it, Google would be drowning in positive content, the NFT would be all over every news site, and news stories would tell people where to get them. TV shows would be full of segments about them, disguised as entertainment or news but intended to boost sales.

Instead of getting information about the NFT and where to get it, I was inundated with links and excerpts excoriating Trump, ridiculing his NFT, and insisting its release was a failure.

I didn’t see any stories about the tokens being “dangerous” or “violence,” but I’m sure they are out there. I’m sure there are people claiming they’ve sustained terrible emotional damage.

Conversing with the leftist world about Trump is like stabbing a rabid dog with a red-hot fork. You can’t even have a conversation about harmless facts.

Was the release a failure? Doesn’t look that way to me. The web admits the NFT’s sold out instantly, and sources suggest $230 is a typical price for an NFT that sold initially for $99. The cheapest ones I’m seeing run almost $500. Some of the tokens are unusual, and they have sold for $24,000. How is this a failure?

There are 45,000 Trumpcoins (“Trumpcoin”?) out there, and their value is probably in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It will probably increase, because Trump is a fleeting phenomenon, and people like me would love to have these NFT’s just to remember him.

If I bought a ton of manure sculpted into a bust of Joe Biden for $99 and sold it immediately for $230, I would be thrilled. If I bought Apple for $99 and sold it the next day for $230, I would be thrilled. Why would I feel bad about selling a $99 Trump token for $230?

After several minutes of Googling, I learned that there is a website called Opensea, and you can buy various NFT’s there. I took a look at it, and it appears to be a useless site for anyone who isn’t in the game already. The prices are listed in Ethereums. An Ethereum is an NFT, so how do I buy the Trump NFT or an Ethereum if I don’t already have an NFT? I assume there is some way around it, but I haven’t looked yet and probably won’t.

That’s some catch, that catch-22.

CNN says, “Donald Trump’s NFT superhero trading cards timed the market all wrong.” So a 130% profit is what you get in one day if you time the market wrong. Timing the market right must turn you into Jeff Bezos in a week.

The Washington Post says, “Trump NFTs are not art. Unless you consider grifting an art form.” That’s a weird comment. The cards feature a funny painting (digital or whatever) of Trump, defiantly facing the viewer. Some cards feature him in cowboy hats. Others show him in a sort of Iron Man suit. Who claimed this was serious art? I’m sure no one ever did. Even if it happened, who cares? The purpose of the issue isn’t to distribute digital art. It’s to make money.

Is the Dogecoin fine art? Was that the purpose? Is any NFT fine art? I know I’ve missed nearly all the memos, but selling anything digital as fine art makes no sense at all. What good is it for me to create and sell a digital Mona Lisa if you can copy it to your hard drive in a hundred-thousandth of a second and email a million copies around the world? Maybe those copies won’t be authorized, but any idiot will still be able to view them and use them as his Windows home screen.

Even if an NFT featuring art is collectible because it’s unique, the quality of the art is irrelevant. The scarcity is what makes it valuable.

Opensea features photos of available Trumpcoins. Can’t you just download those photos? Okay, they may not be high-resolution, but does that matter when you’re looking at a photo of a picture of Trump dressed like a Marvel character?

Here’s a Trumpcoin that just sold for 15 Ethere…ae? Ums? That’s nearly $18,000. Keith Olbermann must be under sedation today.

Why call it grifting? Grifting is fraud. Why is Trump’s NFT any more fraudulent than all the other NFT’s? They’re all digital Beanie Babies and tulip bulbs. People issue them because they know they can spend nearly nothing creating something collectors will snap up and turn into a valuable asset. The whole thing is based on a desire to make money, but how is it dishonest? Everyone knows how it works.

Rolling Stone, the stoner rag that still contends Hunter Thompson was a real journalist, which is about like claiming Charlie Sheen is a journalist, says, “‘I Can’t Watch This’: Even Die-Hard Trump Allies Think His NFTs Are Cringe.”

“Cringe” is not an adjective. Grow up. Don’t you have editors? As for Trump allies, he surrounded himself with a lot of opportunistic people of fragile loyalty, and they have been subjected to insane pressure to turn on him. Naturally, some of them have flipped. What about all the Trump allies who think the NFT is funny and harmless? Count me in that group, not that I make any effort to promote Trump these days.

This is Trump. He has always been a showman. He has always loved fun. He has always loved controversy. He likes money. What did people expect?

What really angers the leftists? Probably the knowledge that the NFT’s, which they can’t trace, tax, or take away, will be worth tons of money soon. They’ll probably go into the billions at some point, and Trump will get some of that. This retards the left’s berserk efforts to starve him and his children.

Surely Trump bought some of these things. He would have to be nuts not to.

If there is anyone who needs concealable assets and money to pay armed security, it’s the Trump family. American leftists are determined to do them the way their predecessors did Czar Nicholas II and his children.

Leftists lie awake every night, tormented by visions of an improbable 2024 Trump victory. Their 2024 campaign started on the day Biden won. They will not stop reviling this man and everything he is associated with, ever. They’ll probably slow down a little when he fails to get the nomination, but they will never quit. Mental illness doesn’t go away by itself.

Trump isn’t coming back. He will be too old to run, and the GOP will see to it that he isn’t nominated. They’re already working on it. People need to quit worrying about it. Personally, I want to see DeSantis run. He’s like Trump with most of the problems filtered out.

TDS comes from the spirit world. Satan sees Trump as a friend of the church and Israel, not to mention the unborn, so he stirs up the vulnerable people he can control. Reasonable dialogue will not change anything. If leftists were reasonable, they wouldn’t run around claiming disagreeing with them is violence. Lunacy has been mainstreamed.

It’s too late for me to get my own Trumpcoin, so I guess I’ll forget about it. They have no physical existence anyway, so I couldn’t display one on my workshop wall or otherwise enjoy it.

I hope they become insanely valuable. I hope they start selling for seven figures each. I hope Trump kept a thousand of the best ones for himself. Of course, I also hope God reaches him and his enemies and helps bring agreement in Him to whoever is willing to receive it.

More

An hour into my career as a crypto expert of global standing, I have already discovered a major flaw in my grasp of the topic. Evidently, an NFT is not the same thing as cryptocurrency.

It looks like Dogecoin, as an example, is just currency, whereas an NFT is a unique digital object, and you can pay for an NFT with cryptocurrency. So I guess NFT’s are digital Beanie Babies and cryptocurrencies are sort of like stocks that aren’t backed by companies with income and assets. So when you buy a digital coin, you’re buying stock in nothing.

In the case of Trumpcoin, the asset is the digital file representing the funny picture.

On the whole, I would say give me commercial real estate.

Garbage Doesn’t Get Better With Time

I keep doing things to improve the house.

Today, I’m looking for ways to get rid of the trash compactor.

I’ll tell you right off; if you use a trash compactor, I have no respect for your trash standards. There are lots of reasons to avoid them, and there is only one reason for having one: laziness.

Garbage compactors attract and feed roaches, ants, mice, and rats. Anything that can squeeze in there will stuff itself on your garbage and then pee and poop all over your kitchen.

Garbage compactors stink. You can’t keep unrefrigerated garbage in your kitchen for days without growing bacteria and fungus.

Garbage compactors turn what should be light, fresh, manageable bags of garbage into heavy bags of rotten garbage.

Garbage compactors encourage dirty, low-class habits.

I used the compactor in this house for a while because the people who built it seemed to know what they were doing. There is no garbage collection, so I drive my garbage to the dump. I thought the previous owners, as longtime farm residents, knew something I did not, so for a time, I tried to do whatever they did.

Eventually, I quit. I could not see any virtues in the compactor. It smelled, the bugs loved it, the bags were heavy, and it didn’t actually save me much work.

At some point, I decided I would no longer tolerate having edible garbage in the house overnight. I started putting all trash that had food in it in the garage in a sealed can before bedtime. I abandoned the garbage compactor, cleaned it as well as I could, and hosed it with pesticide.

Now the kitchen never smells like rotten food, and the bugs and mice are out of luck.

I go to the dump three times a week. Twice if I forget. I buy cheap 30-gallon plastic bags for 10 cents each online, I use them for garbage and lining Marvin’s cage, and I end up spending something like $120 per year. If that sounds like a lot, find out what you spend on expensive bags from the store. A cheap store bag runs 25 cents. Big-name brands cost a lot more. If you’re buying store bags, you’re probably paying more than 2.5 times what I pay.

Last time I bought cheap bags online, I bought a box of 1500. I don’t play. Next time, I’ll try Ebay and see if China has anything cheaper.

Bag makers like Hefty love to talk about how tough their bags are. Know why? They’re trying to appeal to dirty, lazy people. “We know you only take the trash out once a month, so here’s a bag you can jam 50 pounds into. Go ahead and jam your foot in there. Pack it down good. Our bag won’t split. Comes with free cotton to shove up your nose.”

You don’t need tough bags. You need to get your butt to the curb or the dump more often.

What do professionals use, in places where letting trash sit can lead to big fines? They use exactly what I use. You’ve seen them beside highways, waiting to be picked up. You’ve seen them on the backs of utility carts at stadiums and malls. Hefty bags are for people who let garbage rot in their houses.

If your trash is moving out of your house in a timely way, you don’t need a bag that can contain a rabid wolverine. It just has to survive long enough to make it to the can or the dumpster.

I’m naturally lazy myself, so anything that helps me improve is welcome.

When I was looking after my dad, I was lazy with the garbage. Usually, I didn’t do all that bad, but often I made dump visits a week apart, which was disgraceful. There were times when the bed of the pickup was pretty full.

When you have a dementia patient in your house, garbage piles up fast. You need to stay on top of it. I did a poor job. Since then, by God’s grace, I have repented. In the time since I turned over a new leaf, there have been days when I simply forgot to go, and I ended up with little ecosystems developing in the bags, but overall, I love going to the dump, and it’s unusual for me to miss visits.

When I go, I see horrendous scenes that take me back, except many are a lot worse than the scenes I caused. Many people show up with pickups entirely full of bags. I see people walking quickly to the dumpsters, holding dripping bags as far from themselves as they can. I’ve seen utility trailers covered with bags.

When I go to the dump, I look carefully at the people in front of me. Here’s a tip for dump users: never get behind a trailer, a pickup, or a van if you can help it. There is a reason people bring vehicles like that. Clean people generally drive passenger cars and only have a few bags.

Now that I have better habits, I am disturbed by other people’s practices. I pray for them. I look at their beat-up cars, their mountains of maggot-ridden trash, their tasteless, ill-fitting, stained, worn-out clothes, their tattoos, their obesity, and even their bad posture, and I realize they have problems going far beyond poor trash standards. I know demons are involved. They need to know God. I am being improved, and they need the same help I’m getting.

I want to get rid of the trash compactor and fill the space with some kind of storage, but I don’t know if there is any way to do it without ruining the way the kitchen looks. Maybe a handyman could find a matching set of drawers.

I also want to get rid of my terrible sink.

The lady who designed the kitchen was no cook. I can tell, because she did things a good cook would not do. First, the compactor. Second, she bought a 4-burner electric stove with a useless electric grill taking up space in the middle. Third, she put her wall oven at knee height. Fourth, she gave a microwave priority, installing it above the oven. And the oven the house came with had no warming drawer.

The worst thing she did was to install a two-basin sink.

My sink has a gigantic basin on the left, and it has a small basin on the right with a garbage disposal. The big basin is too small to wash cookie sheets. Unforgivable. The small basin is not much good for anything.

I tried to find out why people get two-basin sinks, since it’s clearly a stupid design. It turns out one answer is laziness. People want to be able to hide dirty dishes in one basin.

Okay, so your dishwasher is a foot from the sink, and you want a place to hide dirty dishes instead of, at the very least, putting them in the dishwasher to wait.

You already have a roach feeder full of old garbage, and you want to add a roach buffet to the sink area.

What?

I remember a time when I was too lazy to put dishes in the machine. I would say it ended about 25 years ago. If you can’t find it in yourself to put a dish on a dishwasher rack and push a button, you have a very serious problem. As I did, for half of my life.

I want to put a new sink in, but the old one is in a stone counter, and they cut the stone so you can’t put a rectangular sink in it. You have to find a sink that’s bigger on the left side. Turns out they exist. I guess a lot of people got tired of their ill-conceived two-basin sinks and had them replaced. If you’re in my shoes, you may be able to buy a one-basin offset sink that will fit your hole. “Offset” is the Google term you need.

You may also be able to use an apron sink. These things rest on top of counters, covering up a lot of the stone. If your counter has weird cuts in it, you may be able to put an apron sink on it.

I think I am headed for an apron sink. The likelihood that a one-basin offset sink will fit the cutout I have now is not high, and I don’t believe I can make my cutout fit a new sink without ruining the cutout’s appearance. An apron sink doesn’t need a perfect cutout because the edges of the cutout would be covered. I should be able to open my cutout up with an angle grinder and make an apron sink fit.

My advice is to avoid garbage compactors and two-basin sinks. Sooner or later, you will know you made big mistakes.

I want a new faucet to go with the sink. The existing faucet is very low, which is extremely bad design. You want to be able to get things between the faucet and the sink. Big things, like 3-gallon pots. The faucet I have is in the way all the time, and it dribbles water back onto the stone, where a calcium crust forms.

I plan to get what is known as a pot-filler faucet. It will arch up over the sink, and it will have a built-in sprayer on a hose.

I don’t know how the original owner’s wife managed to do anything in the kitchen. Maybe she didn’t.

I’ve talked to Rhodah about these things, and she says I should wait until she moves here. That never occurred to me. I’m so used to the single mindset. Having someone to help me is a new experience.

Storm Update

God, as always, has been extremely gracious, and the corpse of Hurricane Nicole has done no damage here. The putative center of the former storm is now as close to me as it will get. It’s breezy, and there is a little rain, but even the Weather Channel’s trained actors couldn’t make this look like a real tropical storm. At least not so far.

I am now seeing one outlet predicting stronger winds later today. That is new. I hope it’s just the usual over-reaction. If not, I’ll be moving to the Red Roof Inn.

My prediction, which is worth what I paid for my meteorology diploma: things will get better, not worse. As the storm moves to the west, winds will have to go over most of the lower half of the state to get here, and that should cut their speed. Also, the storm is getting weaker with time.

I guess this theory won’t work if the winds in the bottom half of Nicole are stronger than they are up north. This doesn’t appear to be true, though, because if it were, Sarasota and Orlando would be having high winds now, and they are not.

Winds can’t just materialize magically in the middle of dry land. The storm circulates. Before the winds get here, they have to be somewhere else.

The same site that says we’ll have 33 mph base winds 45 minutes from now says we’re at 15. So an 18 mph increase in 45 minutes? Doubt it.

A friend in the northern part of the county says she lost power, which is surprising, but the properties where she live are maintained pretty badly. Maybe that’s the explanation.

She also managed to get a broken window, which is a bigger surprise. It’s a good idea to protect windows during hurricanes, but even if you don’t, the odds of losing one are low. And this is no hurricane. It was barely a hurricane when it WAS a hurricane.

My power company, which is one of two in this county, reports 489 customers with no electricity, county-wide. Not bad. Duke Energy, the other company, reports around 6 times as many, which is much worse but still nothing compared to Irma.

Maybe Duke Energy doesn’t manage trees well. My company went on a trimming binge last year.

In other news, I am very happy with the batch of Texas trash I made. I’ll post the recipe.

INGREDIENTS

1/4 cup butter, melted
1 teaspoon celery seed
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon salt
2 tbsp. brown sugar
1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
1 tbsp. A1 sauce
1 teaspoon chipotle powder
4 tablespoons Crystal sauce
10 cups cheddar Chex Mix
2 cups Spanish peanuts

You just mix it up, spread it in a pan, and bake it at 250° until it drys out. I stir it every 20 minutes for the first hour, and then I quit.

MSG might make it better. MSG is the reason it’s so hard to eat only one Dorito.

For some reason, idleness sets in during a storm, so you do trivial things to kill time. Yesterday I put a new diode in my Ronco Showtime rotisserie oven. I installed one a year or two ago, but I did a bad job, and it pooped out.

These ovens have 120V AC wires going straight to the heating element, and there is no way to adjust the heat. A clever guy realized he could reduce the heat by cutting off half the AC signal.

AC is positive half the time and negative the rest of the time. A diode will only permit current to flow one way. If you cut off either the positive or negative part of an AC signal, you reduce the power by half.

I stuffed a questionable diode in there, and it was great until it frizzled due to lack of heat sinking. This time, I used the same diode as the guy who came up with the concept. It’s enormous and should require no heat sinking.

I had to cut wires and put in spade connectors, a selector switch, and shrink tubing. I had to find a way to cram the giant diode into the oven. Now it’s done, so I should be able to slow-cook rotisserie meat.

These ovens are wonderful. It’s hard to believe a TV huckster could invent something that really benefits mankind, but Popeil did it. My only big complaint was the lack of adjustability. If you don’t like things browned well, or you want certain things to cook very slowly, you have to wrap them in foil or try other tricks. Now that my oven is modified (again), I can throw a glazed pork roast in it, slow-cook it for a couple of hours, and then turn the heat up to brown the glaze.

The newer ovens are made in China, and there are complaints. Mine is Korean, and there is really nothing wrong with it. I’ve been through every part of it, so I know how it’s built. It’s not the toughest oven ever made, but it’s not junk, either.

Starlink is working fine, except for one thing. We had a one-second power flicker, and the system had to reboot. Starlink can take a very long time to start working after an outage. I put a battery backup on it, so I should be okay now.

The verdict is in: I’ve decided I’m a big Starlink fan. There are little annoyances, but it works, and it’s a great deal better than my old system. Once it becomes more mainstream, there will be more help available for users, so maybe people like me will not have to crawl around in their attics and drill holes in their walls. Tradesmen will be ready to help.

I also like my VPN, but it isn’t perfect. I get a lot of security puzzles now, and sometimes a site will refuse to load because it’s convinced I’m a hacker.

Hmm. We just got a couple of pretty decent gusts. Hello? Am I still here?

Guess I’ll post this using my mobile hotspot. Come on, Starlink. Get it together for daddy.

MORE

It’s 4 hours later. We are supposed to have winds of around 50 mph. It’s not happening. I’d call it 10 mph.

Never trust a weatherman.

Blazing Internet Speeds Take me Back to 2005

I guess anyone who still reads my blog is pretty bored with the Starlink stuff by now, but here I am with more.

Today I finalized my dish location efforts.

The dish was originally on a short J-mount that used to hold up a Dish dish, and the mount was on the first-story roof about 8 feet from a second-story wall that runs north to south. The wall cut off a big percentage of the dish’s view of the southern horizon.

When you get your Starlink dish, which Starlink whimsically identifies as Dishy McFlatface, the app tells you all kinds of needlessly alarming things. It rants about the necessity for a clear view of the horizon.

Nobody has a clear view of the horizon. Maybe if you live in the desert or on a ship. Or on top of a mountain or skyscraper. Other than that, no.

I learned about Starlink’s somewhat neurotic horizon obsession when I opened the Starlink box for the first time. Prior to that, I had no idea. I just assumed Elon Musk, or “M,” as I like to call him, had some idea what he was doing. If the dish were hard to use in a normal location, he would have told me before sending it to me, right?

Yeah, okay.

It was because of the horizon obsession that I was reluctant to do a serious installation to begin with. I thought I might have to send the dish back in a week. I couldn’t believe it would work here in the woods.

Starlink needs to see the northern sky, and I have tall trees to my north.

When I did my preliminary installation, I got okay performance compared to my old cellular link, but I thought there was probably room for improvement. After all, in addition to the tree problem, there was a vertical wall at a bearing of around 330° (west of north), so my horizon was far from perfect. It was because of this concern that I started moving the dish around and ultimately got a new mount.

I decided to put the new mount on the edge of the second-story roof. This idea was based on some misconceptions. I thought it would be fairly easy to run a wire through the second story wall into the attic from the dish, and from there to another part of the attic where I could get access to a stretch of hallway wall near my desired router location.

I had this ridiculous idea that the southern edge of the upper roof terminated abruptly above a wall, so it would be easy to install the mount on the edge and run the cable a couple of feet down past the eave and into the attic. In reality, and I have no idea why I didn’t check this first, the upper roof slopes down toward the south, so to put the mount on the highest part, I would have to climb up the slope.

Ordinarily, I am not afraid of roofs, but mine is covered with gritty shingles, and the grit comes off under your shoes when you walk on the roof. I can walk up a slope that doesn’t have grit on it, but when you add loose grit to the equation, it’s a different story. I’m not sure how roofers do it.

I walked part of the way up the slope, and I decided it was time for plan B. I was not going to risk rolling off a roof.

I ended up putting the new mount near the old one, a couple of feet farther from the vertical wall and a couple of feet higher. The new mount is around 20″ longer than the new one, so I would say the dish is maybe 4 feet higher than it was yesterday.

Here’s the really irritating part: I turned on the app to see what it thought, and it declared my dish was free from obstructions. So as far as Starlink is concerned, my location is perfect.

If I can get an A+ in a location which is partially blocked, why make so much fuss about obstructions? For all I know, the old location was fine.

I would have checked the old location using the app, but even though I had used the app before, I was not aware it had an obstruction-check feature. I can’t explain this. Maybe the app looks different the first time you turn it on.

So I failed to scout my own roof properly, and I failed to use the app correctly.

Anyway, now I have a dish location that is beyond reproach.

I thought I would have to cut a new hole in my house, but I found I could shove the Starlink cable through a grommet from the old Dish installation.

I pulled the cable through the grommet into an attic space. Then I drilled a hole from the hallway into the attic. I ran the cable over some trusses to the hole, shoved it out of the hole, put a new RJ45 jack on the end, and hooked the router back up. A while later, after Starlink stopped pouting over my impudent interruption, I had the web again. Starlink likes to shut down for a while after you fiddle with it. Perhaps M’s way of wagging his finger at us.

I still don’t have my shielded jacks from Amazon, so I was not able to install a wall plate. I want to have a grounded dish, and without a shielded jack, that means using a jumper to connect the cable’s grounding wire to the shielded plug from the router. I can’t run a jumper through a wall plate without mangling it.

Now I have a router sitting on the hall floor next to a little pile of drywall dust, with a cable hanging out of an unfinished hole. I will fix everything up in three days when the jack arrives.

Here is the big takeaway for other confused Starlink people: YOU DO NOT HAVE TO HAVE AN UNOBSTRUCTED HORIZON. Pay no attention to the nonsense Starlink tells you. Put your dish in the best location you can find without a lot of effort and expense and let the app tell you what it thinks. If the app likes it, leave it alone. If not, move it to different locations in increasing order of installation expense and difficulty. When you get one that works, leave the dish there.

Another important lesson: DO NOT BOTHER WITH THE STARLINK APP’S LOCATION-SCOUTING FEATURE. I mean the one that tells you to point your camera at the sky and stand there like an idiot. It is unnecessary, hard to use, and worthless. It will just discourage you. Set your dish up, turn it on, and rely on the app to tell you how the dish feels. The feature you want to use is called “Visibility.”

Right now, Ookla says I am getting download and upload speeds of 83 and 6, and Starlink’s app says it’s 42 and 12. I’m sure both of these results are wrong, because past experience says both tests are stupid and unreliable, but I think they work for comparison purposes. My old cell connection ran around 12 and 1 on Ookla, so whatever I am actually getting now from Starlink is a lot better.

Why do I say the tests are stupid and unreliable? Well, I just got 83/6 and 42/12 about a minute apart. How can that happen if the tests work?

Being able to use the web 20% as well as a normal person in, say, Bangladesh or Malawi is a heady experience. It’s weird, seeing so little of the swirly Youtube waiting symbol while I try to watch videos. I can’t imagine what real Internet speed is like, though. You people with 300 Mbps must live in a different world.

My next Starlink project will be a cable running under the yard to the shop. I have the Starlink ethernet connector, which should have been built into the router. Elon. I just need to install another wall jack, find the path the old cable used to get out of the house, run a new cable through it, dig a slit in the yard, bury the new cable in it, run it into the pipe leading into the shop, put in a wall jack, and hook up the PC.

In other Musk news, my wife tells me Kathy Griffin and some other celebrities and demi-celebrities have decided to SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER. They are fighting the system. They are determined not to pay him $8 per month for their identity-verifying blue checks. Some are threatening to leave.

There are problems with this movement. Apart from the obvious triviality of the dispute.

First of all, if you leave Twitter, no one will care, and you won’t have a voice any more, so no one will hear you if you continue to criticize. A lot of celebrities are basically washed up, and Twitter helps people realize they still exist, thereby helping them get jobs. If it weren’t for Twitter, who would know people like Kathy Griffin and Valerie Bertinelli were still alive? Until today, I thought Griffin, a cancer victim, was probably dead.

Griffin and Bertinelli changed their Twitter names to Elon Musk and put up tweets supporting left-wing political candidates. They said they did this to prove the blue check process is flawed. Seems to me they proved Musk was right.

Bertinelli says the blue check makes it harder for criminals to impersonate celebrities. So she’s saying the system she describes as flawed works. What? So how does charging for the check make impersonation easier? Is she saying she can’t scrape up $96 per year? Is she saying criminals will pay but celebrities won’t?

If the system works, how come she was able to call herself Elon Musk without losing her blue check? It was still there when she pulled her prank. Shouldn’t blue-checkers be prevented from changing their handles? After all, the check is supposed to be proof they’re who they say they are.

Maybe I don’t understand her argument. She says the system is flawed, and then she says it works. Somehow, charging makes it less likely to work? Maybe I missed a vital tweet that reconciles these claims.

Okay, I’ll clear things up for everyone. First, a disclaimer: I don’t care what happens to Twitter. Second, blue checks should be screened well, and screening should be continuous so blue-checkers can’t change their handles. Third, everyone with any self-respect should get off Twitter and try to regain some dignity.

Who really cares? It’s all junior high to me. It’s amazing that human beings are willing to hiss and claw at each other like this in public. Over $96 per year.

Maybe they do it because celebrities aren’t busy. They have long periods (sometimes multiple decades) of inactivity. What better to do than caper and prance for attention on a free service that brings them attention from lots of people?

I like what Dave Chappelle said about Twitter, but for the profanity: “Apparently they dragged me on Twitter. I don’t give a ___, because Twitter is not a real place.”

What is the other problem with celebrities SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER? Well, they ARE power. Liberals are the establishment. Conservatives and Christians are the counterculture. Elon Musk is an insurgent who just happened to get very rich. Musk is the rebel and protestor. Griffin and Bertinelli are establishment stooges. They’re on the side that slaps down the little people. They’re organs of the military-industrial-entertainment complex. Insiders. Swamp creatures. They’re sith lords. Musk is Luke Skywalker.

I had a thought recently. What if Instagram starts increasing its word limit and giving people checks for nothing? Instagram is a leftist organization, very much in favor of ending free political speech, and it already has a big base. I wonder if Instagram could kill Twitter.

I can’t predict the future, but I know what’s happening right now. Liberals all over America are calling each other and meeting, trying to find a way to end the existential threats of free speech and blue check fees. They really think these phenomena are disastrous for the world. Satan has convinced them up is down and down is up.

Projection. That’s what it is. I was talking to my wife about this the other day. Controlling, abusive people who can’t tolerate dissent project. A delusion comes over them, and they think they people they hurt are the real oppressors. They think they’re victims. When you manage to prevent them from abusing them, they think what you’ve done is abuse.

My dad and sister had this problem. It is truly a mental illness. A state of bona fide delusion. Not far from psychosis.

My sister used to accuse me of having her own faults all the time. It was bizarre. I’ll give you the weirdest example. She used to walk around the house in her underwear. It was trashy and very rude. She would do it in our house and even my grandparents’ house. She would spend the entire day that way. It was normal for her.

One day she was abusing me for some imagined offense, and while she was listing my crimes, she said I walked around in my grandparents’ house in my underwear all the time. Never, ever, EVER happened. I would have been mortified if I had accidentally walked through the house like that. It’s something white trash people do. Decent people have the courtesy to wear clothes.

I think this was the moment when I understood how crazy projection is.

It made me realize why my sister hated other people so much. She thought they were like her. And even more unbelievably, she thought she had their good qualities and the moral high ground.

Maybe that’s why she loved and admired herself so much. I wonder.

Projection is slander and accusation, so no wonder Satan’s children do it. He is the devil, and “devil” means “accuser” and “slanderer.” Look up the Greek.

Sometimes they know they’re slandering, but a lot of the time, they really believe the insane things they say about the people they’re abusing. They hate us because they think we’re like them.

It’s an important thing to understand. It’s a big mistake to treat a crazy person as though he were sane. You waste a lot of time. Reasoning with them is like reasoning with a stump.

It’s so weird, seeing the people who run the world acting like they’re the French Resistance. So brave, agreeing with all the people around them. Agreeing with the people who pay them. Agreeing with most people in our government. What kind of rebellion is that? What kind of revolutionary props up the ruling regime?

The Nazis shot resistors without trials. Here, the people who think they’re rebels get to go to the Oscars.

It’s all incredibly interesting to watch.

The Twitter squabble. Not the Oscars. They’re ridiculous. A bunch of insanely wealthy people, patting each other on the back for playing make-believe.

As of Thursday, I should have a real Internet wall jack, and by next week, I hope to have Starlink in the shop. You can keep Twitter, though.

New Tools and Spending Money are Always the Answers

I feel like posting information for other Starlink Junior users.

First of all, what I have isn’t called “Starlink Junior.” It’s “Best Effort” Starlink. Mr. Musk apparently wanted to reach customers and build a base as soon as possible even though he might not be able to give them the full Starlink treatment, so “Best Effort” is what he offered.

It’s kind of sad, because it makes it sound like they’re really trying, and here I am, calling it “Starlink Junior.”

On the other hand, Mr. Musk has rolled out a new surprise that makes me feel less bad. He is going to throttle everyone. EVERYONE.

By that I mean everyone will be given a data limit. Actual throttling will not occur until you pass it.

I got an email saying anyone who uses more than one terabyte per month will be throttled. This is called the “Fair Use” policy, which is unfortunate, because “Fair Use” is a legal term applied to copyrighted material.

I think it would be more accurate to call it the “Backpedaling to Save Starlink Money” policy, but I am not on the board, so there you go.

I have no idea whether I will use a terabyte per month. Let’s see. That’s around 33 gigs per day, right? Seems a little heavy. I know from using Verizon’s severely-limited “Unlimited” plan that it takes considerable surfing to break through Verizon’s 15 GB cap. That’s how much I get in a month, and during the months when I’ve had to use Verizon because of problems with my ISP, it has taken at least a couple of days to get in trouble.

Mr. Musk says fewer than 10% of users will be affected. My guess: that means about 9.9%. If it had been 8%, to choose a lower number at random, he would have said 8% to make it sound better.

The obvious problem is that web designers are constantly trying to pump up the data they send us. Websites are full of ridiculous garbage we don’t want or need, and it jacks up our consumption. This will probably continue, because when has it not continued? So Starlink’s cap may look a lot less generous in a year or two.

Nerds like to redefine words. I really hate what they’ve done to “unlimited.” Words are not their specialty. They should stay out of the definition business.

Second thing…I got my Starlink cable spliced.

I have to splice my cable because Mr. Musk, or “M,” as I like to call him suddenly, because he is the world’s M, no…wait, he’s the world’s Q. Dang. Well, I’ll call him M anyway. He’s kind of like M. He calls a lot of shots. M has decided to put proprietary plugs on his ordinary Cat5 shielded cables. Starlink cables look all mysterious, but they’re just like the ones you have in your house, only harder to work on.

The plugs are enormous, so in order to put a cable through a wall, you have to cut a 1″ hole. And you can’t decide how long your cable will be. M only sells them in certain lengths. Splicing is the obvious answer. If you can cut your cable and splice it, you can run your cable through a 5/16″ hole instead of an unsightly 1″ hole which is likely to leak and let bugs in even if you try to seal it.

Yesterday, I put an ordinary RJ45 plug on the side of the cable that goes to the router, and I put an RJ45 jack on the other side, intending to mount it to a wall plate later. The idea is dish -> hole in exterior wall -> attic -> rear of interior wall -> RJ45 jack -> wall plate -> RJ45 plug -> cable -> router.

I got okay download speeds after installing the jack and plug, but my uploads were, for practical purposes, motionless, and I got a lot of download errors.

I started researching and asking around.

The Cat5 cable M uses is shielded. It contains 8 conducting wires that do the data stuff, and it also has a bare wire and some foil shielding that goes around all the wires. The bare wire is supposed to be in direct contact with the foil. The foil and bare wire are ground conductors.

Most RJ45 plugs and jacks are not shielded. I can get shielded plugs locally (Lowe’s), but jacks have to come from Cyberia.

I tried to find out whether the shielding and ground had to be intact in order for the system to work. Some guy claimed they did, but he’s a guy who put Starlink in a truck, so who knows whether he knows anything?

I was afraid one or more of the following things were causing a problem: a) failure to reconnect the ground wires on my new ends after splicing, b) failure to reconnect the shielding on my new ends after splicing, and c) a really bad job of putting my new unshielded RJ45 plug on the cable.

I did a bad job with the plug because I did not have the right tool.

Putting Catx plugs and jacks on cables is much more complicated than it has to be. The tools you use for plugs don’t do the same things jack tools use, and different brands of plugs and jacks don’t work with every tool made by every company.

You can put a jack on a cable using a simple tool called a punch down tool. These range in price from $10 to at least $60. You can also use a screwdriver and knife, but don’t. Just do not.

You can also use a special crimping tool which is sort of like pliers. These things appear to start at about $50, unless you want to take a chance with low-end Chinese.

Plugs require crimping tools, period. You can try faking it with whatever you have on your bench, but it’s a bad idea.

When it comes to things you can find today near your house, you are probably limited to Ideal and Klein. Klein makes a crazy-complicated tool that will do jacks and plugs, but it only works with Klein stuff. Ideal’s plug tools only do Ideal plugs, and they don’t do jacks.

You can see what a mess it is.

Want some help? Here you go. Buy a package of Ideal shielded plugs. Buy an Ideal FT-45 crimping tool. These things will run you over $80, but it beats hiring some slacker who will charge a lot more and not care how much he damages your house.

Now you can do plugs.

For a wall jack, buy a trueCABLE Cat6 toolless keystone jack from Amazon. These things are shielded. I have not been able to find shielded jacks locally. I don’t know what “keystone” means, but I know that local stores sell wall plates that fit keystone jacks.

You can get a pack of two jacks for $13. I don’t know how to buy a single jack, or I would have.

Now you can do jacks.

When you attach your jack and plug, use the T-568B wiring standard. The wires in your cable are colored, and the standard tells you which wire goes where. There is also a T-568A standard, which only the government uses, because the government has to be an idiot.

The good news: you only need shielded stuff on the cable that goes from the router to the dish. In your walls, if you choose to have hardwiring, you can use plain old plastic jacks and plugs. I only need one shielded jack and one shielded plug. I’m going to use shielded plugs all over the place anyway because I had to buy a bag of 10.

What is shielding? It’s a conductive barrier that reduces the amount of electrmagnetic interference your cables pick up. When your cable tries to pick up the local rap station instead of your data, it feels like you when you use a cell phone in an elevator. It gets nowhere, so your precious data, which could, ironically, be rap MP3’s, passes through unmolested.

Why isn’t all Catx cable shielded? I don’t know. I guess it doesn’t need it.

The cable that Starlink uses doesn’t just carry 1’s and 0’s. It carries power to move the dish. This, I have learned, is called PoE, or “power over ethernet.” Why the mixed-case letters? Because nerds have no verbal aptitude; they don’t know it’s wrong. Is the juice the reason your cable is shielded? Is M running the juice through the foil and grounding wire? No idea, but why take a chance?

Will using unshielded stuff really let bad interference in? Again, no idea. My guess: not. My connection is still unshielded for about an inch, and it seems to be working fine. The ground is continuous, but the shielding is interrupted.

Today I used an Ideal FT-45 tool to install a shielded Ideal RJ45 plug on my cable. I left my unshielded jack alone. I ran a jumper from the ground on the jack to the ground on the plug, just in case. Now everything works. And I’m stuck with a $50 tool.

Will M void your warranty if you splice your cable? No idea, but it sounds like something he would do. I do not care. I was willing to bet the $600 cost of the router and dish that I could splice my cable without ruining anything.

Today my wife was laughing like crazy because M was trying to charge people to use Twitter. I don’t look at the news, but I will make an exception to comment on this story.

As you probably know, but I barely do, Twitter has a caste system. There are verified users who have blue check marks next to their handles, and there are the lowly, unwashed users who have no check marks. My understanding is that people are so stupid and immature, they actually look down on folks who have no check marks. Junior high never really ends.

M said he wanted to charge Twitter brahmins $20 per month for check marks, which is reasonable, since a lot of them get paid, and they also feel like they’re cooler than everyone else. Kim Kardashian is said to receive seven figures for every slutty, vacuous tweet.

My wife says there has been a hilarious tweet battle between a bemused M and his sincerely enraged brahmins. They are saying M should be paying them to tweet. Hello? Who said this about Huffto about a billion years ago? Me. Ariana Huffington, in an action harking back to Tom Sawyer’s ploy to get his friends to paint the fence, got people to write content for nothing, and they thought it was a privilege.

Anyway, it sounds like billionaires and the nearly so, like Stephen King, are losing their minds over eight smackers a month.

I think M is making a mistake. Social giants can push conservatives, Christians, and other decent people around, because we don’t run the Internet or Silicon Valley. When Facebook or Twitter pushes us around, we can bluster and leave and form pathetic, doomed alternatives like MeWe. Truth, and Parler, but they never go anywhere. Liberals, on the other hand, created Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Instagram, Youtube, and the good Lord only knows what else, and they can create new giants. And Twitter isn’t going to be around forever. Social giants fail.

The conservative giants, or, more accurately, anemic midgets with peanut allergies, will all fail completely or remain unimportant. This is my bold prediction, which isn’t all that bold, because it’s already happening.

A new leftist giant might make it.

Some think Trump is the troll king, but M is on a far higher level.

Anyway, I can totally see M voiding my warranty over a splice. Go see what he has done to Tesla owners.

If you take my advice, you can splice your cable and avoid buying new proprietary cables and cutting large holes. And maybe your router will explode. I’m not an engineer. Anyway, I hope my advice helps.

Honey Doing

Starlink Junior, my slow version of Starlink, has worked out so well, I have dumped my old Internet provider.

I suppose I would have had the courage to make the break sooner had Starlink felt like including real instructions and some kind of user support. I didn’t know how to install the dish. I didn’t know how to rout the cable. I didn’t know how to tell if the dish was pointed the right way or located where it should be. Starlink gives you cartoon instructions and a terse app, but you have to figure a lot out by yourself.

Starlink is one of those companies that causes its customers to work harder by trying to shut them out of the technical side of things. It’s a bad approach. Real black boxes that do everything perfectly the second you pop them out of the UPS package are rare. My feeling is that Elon Musk thinks he has done all the thinking for us already, and frankly, he’s not that good. There are a lot of things he and his team have not thought of.

I had a Dish Network dish on my roof, so I put the Starlink dish on it, and I added an 8-foot pole from Ace Hardware. Starlink insisted I needed extremely clear horizons, so I thought I was going to have to get the dish as high as possible. My roof is irregular, and I’m surrounded by trees.

Today I took the pole out of the system and left the Starlink dish in the Dish dish mount, and it seems to work about the same. I don’t know what to make of it, but stabilizing the long pole will take some metalworking and carpentry, and I don’t want to continue working on these things if they’re a waste of time.

I decided to order a new J-mount (this is what you call a thing that holds a dish or antenna) and put it on my topmost roof section. Because of the geometry of my roof, this is actually a very easy place to install a J-mount. I don’t want to use the old J-mount because I would have to move it, and removing it could tear up the roof.

The new mount will go on the roof next to the edge. The cable will go over the edge and through a hole in the wall below the soffit, into the attic, unless I decide to put it through the roof. Going through the roof could be a problem, because I would have to seal the new hole, and it would see a lot of rain. A hole in the wall under the eave would never get wet, so caulk and a coax grommet should fix it easily.

I was not very familiar with the part of my attic where the cable will go, so I took a look. I had put it off because I was afraid of what I would see. Roof rot? A horrible space to work in? Dead roaches and rats? It turned out to be in great shape, well organized, with hardwired lighting and a convenient switch.

When my new mount comes, I’ll have to go up in there, work my way 30 feet to the south, grab the cable, and feed it to the location where the router will go.

My house has ethernet cables, but I have never used them. I have been able to get along without them, and also, I had my wireless router in a place where there was no port. Now that situation is changing. I want to connect my TV’s and computers to the wiring, and I want to revive the long-destroyed Cat5 wire to the workshop. I have a computer there, but I have to use my phone as a hotspot in order to get a connection.

I have to find out where the ethernet cables originally joined. There had to be a router somewhere. Then I can use an adaptor (I will resist “adapter” until people start writing, ‘rapter,’ ‘capter,’ ‘recepter,’ and ‘intercepter.”) to hook my dish up to the house wiring. This will give me the best possible speeds.

I don’t have to have perfection. If I could get 20 Mbps down and 10 real Mbps up every minute of the day, I’d be the happiest person on Earth.

Right now, speed tests say I get 6-120 Mbps down, but when I actually download things, the best I see is about 1.6. I suspect Musk is secretly throttling me because I’m not one of the cool kids in a real Starlink coverage area. If the router can get 100 Mbps, I ought to be able to do a lot better than 1.6 when I download a file. I don’t think the connection is the problem.

Starlink told me it wouldn’t have satellites set up for my area until next year, but apparently, that’s deceptive. They made it sound like they couldn’t give me high speeds without new satellites, but it looks like they can give me lots of speed, and they just don’t want to. Maybe speeding me up will slow the cool kids down.

Starlink isn’t the only thing I’m working on here. I’m getting a ton of stuff done. Jobs that used to intimidate me are falling like dominoes. I started out by fixing my shop, but now order is spreading to the house, as I almost didn’t dare hope it would.

I got my keychain rack made, and it’s a much bigger help than you would think. I cleaned out the freezer where ginger ale exploded. I put my bedroom in order. I started moving things from the dining room workshop to the real workshop. I blasted the house, including all the attics I can get to, with pesticide. For a long time, I couldn’t get the filters out of the range hood, and they were getting nasty, but yesterday, they came right out, and they went in the dishwasher. The laundry room and its closet are nearly in order. I got the burglar alarm upgraded to 4G. I’m getting flu and shingles vaccines tomorrow. Today I mixed salt and garlic into 5 pounds of ground chuck and turned it into patties, so now I have lunch waiting for me for the next 12 days.

I’ve taken a lot of annoying things to the dump. I started converting my storage room fluorescents to LED’s. I got a wireless printer.

I can’t remember all the other things I’ve done, but I can sure tell when I walk around the house.

Disorder bothers me now. I take pleasure in straightening things sitting on tables and counters, even though it doesn’t matter.

A few days ago, I was praying, and I heard, “Order my life,” over and over. I asked for it, of course. I’ve been praying prayers similar to that for years. It looks like the words came from God, because I can’t stop ordering this place.

My mother went through something similar when she was several years younger than I am. She started telling me how great it was to have everything in its place. She organized things for the first time in her life. Then she learned she had cancer, and she died.

The ordering I’m doing makes me wonder if God is preparing what I have for my wife’s arrival or for my departure. In April, I’ll be as old as my mother was when she died.

It’s wonderful to find out that things you think you heard from God really came from Him. It means you can trust what you hear in the future. It also helps you to be unified with Him.

In June, my wife had two visions, and one came true when Queen Elizabeth died. In the other vision, she saw Russia bombing Japan. I wonder if it will happen. A quick Google says Japan just expelled Russia’s ambassador, and relations are at a new low. Russia and Japan are still hashing out World War Two, and Russia has just abandoned peace talks. I don’t know much about Russia’s relationship with Japan, but things sound bad.

I love having order in my life. It’s not completely pleasant, finding yourself compelled to do things you used to put off luxuriously, but overall, it’s exciting. I hope it continues. I always say good habits are like slaves. They get things done for you, and they don’t cost anything.

Speaking of habits, I also heard, “Your habits are important.” I think about that when I’m about to put something off or do it badly. I feel that if I give in and let things slide, I’m spitting on something God gave me; a treasure. How many people get express advice from God? That’s not something to take for granted. Elon Musk and Bill Gates don’t get it. The president of the United States doesn’t get it. Famous musicians and Hollywood stars don’t get it. Nobel prize winners don’t get it. I get something only a tiny percentage of people get, and it’s something you can’t buy. If you could, the price would be astronomical. I have to take it seriously.

I believe whether I can hold onto my gifts and receive more depends a lot on how much my actions show how much I value them.

Tomorrow another big load goes to the dump, and I’m sure I’ll find several other fossilized obligations to move out of my own way.

Because I keep getting bogged down in things Rhodah could do if she were here, what I’m going through reminds me how good God’s plan for marriages is. The man handles certain things, and the woman handles others. I can take care of the shop and grounds, but I keep getting pulled backward by problems in the house. If Rhodah were here, she would deal with those things, and I would get my own work done much better, in much less time. She can’t wait to get here to run the house.

Feminism is filthy. It destroys our potential as couples and families. The benefits we get from women pursuing careers is trivial compared to what we lose by having God’s order in our homes destroyed. Thank God my wife has no interest in feminism. I look forward to the day when I don’t have to concern myself with housewife responsibilities.

Rising to the Occasion

The workshop is becoming more and more orderly and less dysfunctional every week. Can the rest of my life be far behind? The other day, I was praying, and I heard myself saying, “Order my life,” over and over. Yesterday or the day before, I heard, “Your habits are important.” Little words and phrases that come from God can make big changes in your life.

I bought myself a big ice cream maker with built-in refrigeration, and I also got a deep fryer and a Ronco rotisserie. As a result, my counters look like Fred Sanford’s yard. I started building a kitchen cart to hold these things, but I got distracted, possibly by the unexpected courtship that led to me marrying my wonderful wife. I had built most of the frame of the cart, but it sat and rusted after that.

Rust was never a problem in Miami. I was led to believe that things rusted quickly in warm, humid places, but the opposite is true.

Rust is caused by condensation more than above-average humidity. When you have sudden temperature swings, things that are cold collect water until they warm up. Then they rust. Sudden swings happen all the time in most of America, but the closer you get to the tropics, the rarer they are.

Where I live now, I have to cover bare iron up or spray it with greasy concoctions unless I want rust.

This week, I started working on the cart again, and I had to begin with about an hour of knocking rust off with an angle grinder and a paint-stripping wheel.

As of last night, I had the frame nearly done. I have to weld one more piece of tubing into it, and I also have to add two attachments to set one pair of wheels farther apart than the other two.

When I started working on this thing, I was under the impression it had to be very square. I was planning on welding 4 plate casters on the bottom, and if you have 4 wheels on a rigid object, and they’re not in exactly the same plane, the object will rock or one caster won’t touch the floor. I welded it up carefully, but it’s still off by almost 1/8″. Since starting the project, I have realized the answer isn’t perfect fabrication; it’s casters with stems.

A lot of products have casters or feet on threaded stems. The reason is that you can adjust their height to make up for small errors in the construction of the products.

Yesterday, I made three little pucks of steel, and I drilled and tapped them. I’m going to weld them into the bottom of the cart and use stem casters.

I have also learned that every 4-wheeled object should have one set of wheels that are farther apart than the others. Or closer together, if you look at it that way. A trapezoidal footprint makes it impossible for an object to rock. It can fall over, but it can’t rock back and forth, and rocking can lead to tipping. Also, increasing the length of one axle will make tipping harder even without considering rocking. It puts the center of gravity farther inboard from the wheels.

To increase the width of one set of wheels, I made these things out of 1″ by 3″ tubing:

I will weld them onto one pair of vertical tubes on the cart, and I’ll put the caster nuts I made in them, as far out as possible.

I have also replaced all the lights in my shop. LED’s are improving at a furious pace.

Where I used to have two relatively expensive 4000-lumen fixtures that were built in, I now have 4 3000-lumen jobs from Home Depot, wired to trusses. They cost me $17 each. They don’t have tubes, so they cost less. I can’t replace dead tubes when they go out, but the fixtures cost about the same amount of money as two tubes, so it doesn’t matter. I hardwired them pretty easily.

I had two somewhat dim 4-foot LED lights over three areas in the shop. I went to Harbor Freight and got three 5000-lumen replacements for $17 each. The quality appears to be about the same. China is China.

I bought my self 16 feet of white LED strip lighting, and I put it in my shelf complex.

These things come with an adaptor that plugs into one end. This is a problem if you want to have the adaptor and switch in the middle, along with a stretch that doesn’t give off light. If you run a strip through two cabinets, you don’t want light between the cabinets. I figured there had to be a way to splice them.

Turned out I was right. I put 42″ of wire between two 8-foot sections. Now the switch is where I want it to be, and I don’t have a useless strip of light running across the wall.

You can splice them with a soldering iron and shrink tubing. Look it up if you’re interested. It’s simple. They also make clips to splice LED strips, but people say they are unreliable.

I got the strip lights as a lark. They’re not a permanent solution. LED strips are pretty tacky if you can see them, and I can see mine. They’re best for indirect light, so the strips are concealed. They’ll do for now, though.

I got my smallest leaf blower running. It’s a tiny Husqvarna I’ve had since Miami. It would be worthless for cleaning up a yard, but it’s perfect for a workshop with big doors. At the end of a session, you vacuum up anything that can damage concrete (steel filings=rust stains), you fire the blower up, and you blow everything else out into the yard. My big electric blower would actually be better, but the Husqvarna is light and convenient, and it’s important to run small engines frequently because leftists have ruined the world with ethanol gas that kills carburetors and other parts.

I was thinking of putting up a second building, and I got an estimate. Now I want to make the most of my existing building first. To that end, I am considering building a loft and an elevator.

You would think putting an elevator in a workshop would cost thousands of dollars, but it doesn’t. An OSHA-approved elevator with all the bells and whistles would probably cost as much as a Cadillac, but you don’t need that kind of equipment in a home shop. You just need a platform that goes up and down without killing anyone.

Somebody came up with a way to combine a cheap winch, steel struts from Home Depot, rollers, and plywood to make an elevator that will move a person and maybe 350 pounds of stuff, depending on how fat the person is. I’ll embed a video chosen at random.

I had thought about building a loft, but a loft usually means stairs or a ladder. I am not going to carry things up a ladder, and stairs would take up maybe 30 square feet and make it hard to get around the shop. With an elevator, I can put things like a pressure washer or generator on the platform, get on with them, and ride up in comfort. An elevator would only take up maybe 12 square feet, and it would be against a wall, out of the way.

The added bonus of an elevator is that you can leave it about three feet from the floor and use it as a workbench.

If I had a loft, I could get some big things off the floor. I have a portable table saw, a pressure washer, and a sliding miter saw. I could also put shelves in the loft and use them for things that are rarely used but too good to throw out. Big jugs of machinery oil, for example.

My walls are only 12 feet high, so in order to get a reasonable height under the loft, I would have to make do with around 5 feet between the loft and the ceiling, but that’s a whole lot better than nothing, and I wouldn’t be playing basketball up there.

I would have to add a built-in ladder in case the power went out while I was up there, but that would take up almost no room.

It can be done. It has been done.

The only question is how big to make it. I’m thinking maybe 6 feet by 16. I don’t want to put a whole wall in the shade. If I change my mind, adding more loft space would be simple.

There are a lot of Youtube videos featuring shopmade elevators, and there is a lot of negativity in the comments. “Kids will hurt themselves.” “You’ll get your foot caught between the elevator and the stuff beside it.” “The cable will break, and you’ll fall.” A smart person put up the obvious response, saying shops are already full of dangerous things. A band saw can take a finger off in a hurry. Grinders can kill in an instant. A lathe can roll an arm up like a sock. Somehow these things are okay, but an elevator is too perilous? Not listening.

The fall hazard can be negated pretty easily. They make contraptions that catch things when they start to fall.

It looks like an elevator can be installed for well under a grand, and it’s not a really big job.

I may also build a shed. I can buy a little one for $600, but I would like to have one big enough to put the utility cart and garden tractor in when I’m using the shop. Just to keep the rain off. I think it would be a simple matter of installing 6 four-by-four poles with concrete slugs and running boards between them, with steel roof panels above.

When the loft and elevator are done, I can put in a split AC unit. I have until about mid-April to get that done. The weather should be acceptable until then. I’ll want a drywall ceiling with insulation, as well as an new insulated roll-up door and insulation for the conventional garage door.

That’s about all the shop news. If I go through with the loft plan, of course I’ll post photos.

Think I’ll go Fire up the 8-Track

I’m so old, I am even behind the times when it comes to hanging pictures on the wall. Technology has left me in the dust again.

The people who built this house put a coat rack in the entrance beside the door to the garage, but they were not smart enough to put up a keychain rack. I have three gates, several vehicles, two tractors, and a bunch of locking tool chests. I also have door openers and gate openers. I was not happy with the mess and the time I lost looking for things. I decided to make a rack.

I thought I would just go to Amazon and order a Chinese rack, but Amazon’s racks are not very good. Generally, they have 4 or 6 hooks. That wouldn’t even get me through my vehicles.

Back when I was in Miami, one of the few perks was free mahogany. Mahogany is native to South Florida. It was not introduced. The wood looks very good. There are tons of mahogany trees along the roads, and they fall over a lot, so it’s not unusual to find free logs in trash piles. This happened to me. I found a bunch of logs and cut short boards from them. I had no choice about the length. Tree trimmers don’t leave long logs.

I brought a few of the boards with me when I moved. I thought they would be nice for making boxes. A pretty box doesn’t need sturdy, uniform wood. It needs figured wood with lots of colors in it. That’s what I got.

I rummaged through the boards looking for something I could use to make a key rack, and I found an oddly-shaped piece that was highly figured and partially spalted. Spalting is rot, but it’s rot that doesn’t completely destroy the strength of the wood. It is often used in things like boxes.

I planed and jointed the board down to about 3/8″ in thickness, and I decided to use it as it was instead of cutting it up and using it in a fancy rack. As much as I hate Miami, I felt the board had history just as it was.

Ordinarily, I don’t like wood projects that are described as “rustic” or having “live edges.” I think these terms are excuses for laziness and lack of skill. But sometimes something looks better left alone.

I sanded it, applied Danish oil, and put 15 brass-plated hooks in it. Rack. All that was left was to hang it.

I didn’t want loops of wire sticking out above it where they could be seen, and I needed the rack to be held firmly to the wall. When you hang a picture, it doesn’t have to be held rigidly, but you don’t hang things on pictures. You have to touch a key rack, and if it moves while you’re fiddling with keys, it’s annoying, and it will swing and scratch the wall.

I decided to try Velcro. It would be hidden. It would hold the board firmly. I could put pieces up high and down low so the board would not be able to rock against the wall.

I put 4 little pieces of Velcro on the back, put the rack on the wall, and got to work redoing my keychains. While I was doing this, I heard a noise. The board had come loose. I tried pressing it against the wall harder, but a few minutes later it came loose completely and fell, knocking a chunk of spalted wood off.

Back to the shop.

I realized Velcro’s adhesive would not stick to Danish oil. It stuck to the wall just fine, to the point where I damaged the paint pulling Velcro off. On a board finished with Danish oil, it was a disaster waiting to happen.

I glued the missing chunk in, and it looked like it had never come loose. I went to the web and asked woodworkers for help.

Their answers were really bad. I think most of them were older than I am, and they had no idea how picture-hanging technology had changed.

One said to rout pockets in the back of the board and put little nail receptacles in them. This would hold the board up, but it would move around every time I touched the board.

Someone else suggested using a special router bit to cut keyhole-shaped recesses. These are hard to describe, but basically, one end of the recess is wide enough to let a nail’s head in, and the other end is skinny. You put the nail’s head in the big hole, and when your picture slides down due to gravity, the head is captured in the skinny end of the hole. Google it if you want to understand.

This would have been hard to do on a 3/8″ board, and I would have had to locate the nails in the wall very precisely, which is not easy. Then I would have had a relatively flimsy attachment which would have let the board move.

I started Googling, and I found out there are a bunch of new hanging systems. The 3M company has one called the Claw. It’s a flat piece of metal with two sharp points behind it. You push the sharp bits into the wall and hang your picture on the flat part. There are also tiny metal French cleats now. Look it up. It’s hard to explain. There is also a special Velcro system.

I decided to do it my own way. The problem was that the Velcro came off the board. I could fix that. I took the board and used acetone to remove the finish from parts of the back. Then I applied Velcro in 4 places. Then I stapled the Velcro to the board. Good luck peeling off now, Velcro.

The impact of my staple gun knocked another big piece of spalted wood off the board, bringing me close to cardiac arrest, but I found it and glued it back in.

The key rack is now back on the wall, loaded with keychains. I think it will be there when the sun dies. It’s easy to peel Velcro off if you pull perpendicularly to the surface it’s on, but peeling it by moving it sideways is basically impossible. The force on the Velcro is all parallel to the wall.

If you have stuff to hang on your walls, don’t do whatever you did 40 years ago. You are older and less hip than you think. Things you think happened three years ago happened during the last century. Certain shoes you think of as new are older than law school graduates. Go look up the new hanging technology. I didn’t use it, exactly, but I did something similar to it, and the old methods would have been unsatisfactory.

I hope the rack doesn’t fall off during the night, forcing me to come back and admit failure.

Of course, if I never told you, you would never find out.

It’s looking good right now.

God has helped me bring order to my shop, and I have been hoping it would spread to the house. Maybe it will.

How to Make an $800 Product Cost $1000 and Fail Sooner

Today I’m here to roast Bosch.

The Bosch company makes a lot of nice stuff, and I should know, because I own a lot of it. Big router. Hammer drill. Demo hammer. Bits. Two angle grinders. Sometimes, though, they really blow it.

My first angle grinder was a small Bosch, around 4 amps. It ran fine, and they gave it a nice long cord the way tool manufacturers should. The problem is that the cord disintegrated.

I don’t know what kind of faux rubber they put on the cord, but it started cracking at the boot next to the tool, and latitudinal cracks eventually appeared from one end to the other.

I bought a new Bosch cord, which was surely a mistake. It’s probably as bad as the old one. I didn’t install it for a long time because the old one was hanging in there. And because Bosch, in its wisdom, used a combination of Phillips screws and Torxes.

Torxes fall into the category of tamper-proof fasteners. Tamper-proof fasteners are used on things like Coke machines to keep people from getting into them. Here’s the thing, Bosch: REPAIRING MY OWN TOOLS ISN’T TAMPERING.

At least it wasn’t a second-tier tamper-resistant Torx.

A Torx is bad enough, because you have to buy bits or drivers to turn it. A second-tier tamper-resistant Torx is worse because the fastener has a little nipple in the bottom of the hole, and it pushes your driver out every time you push it in. The other day, I took apart a DeWalt product that had these things in it.

People like to make excuses for companies that use Torxes. They say they’re for ease of assembly. No, they’re really not. At least not the tamper-resistant kind. They don’t stick to a driver any better than a regular Torx. Companies use them to discourage people like you and me from fixing our products. They want us to throw them out or pay for repairs.

I now have just about every known type of tamper-resistant fastener bit. I have so many, the cops should have me on a list. I can open an iPhone, a tablet, a Dewalt battery charger…don’t try me. Companies that use these things didn’t stop me. They just made me waste money. And they made me more dangerous.

I can’t even guess what it would have cost me to send the angle grinder to a repair center. Probably more than I paid for it.

I finally stuck the new cord in there, and if it falls apart, too, I’ll go to Home Depot, buy a quality extension cord that will last 100 years, and stuff it into the angle grinder.

Second Bosch fail: my dishwasher. Overall, it’s okay, except that Bosch has decided I’m not supposed to have dishes or pots over a certain size. Ziss is not necessary, ja? My old Whirlpool or whatever it was would let you wash an ottoman if you felt like it. To use the Bosch, I had to buy a set of new plates. You can probably guess what brand my next dishwasher won’t be.

Anyway, plates: $40 at Bed Bath & Beyond. Dishwasher: $800. No contest.

Good dishwashers have latches. They have hinged handles. To open a good dishwasher, you pull the handle up, the latch opens, and you’re in. My Bosch has a motionless handle built into the top panel that runs across the door. You pull the handle, putting lots of strain on the panel, until something in the dishwasher gives.

A couple of years back, the handle started to rip from the tremendous force I had to apply to it. The plastic was about two millimeters thick, so no wonder it gave.

I could not buy a handle by itself. It was molded into the control panel. I looked the part up, and the best I could do was well over a hundred dollars. This part probably costs 5 dollars to make.

No, probably less. You can buy much heavier plastic products for $7, retail. This panel probably cost less than two bucks to make.

I got myself a type of JB Weld made for structural repairs to plastic. This stuff sticks to plastic very well, and it’s hard and tough. I took the panel off the dishwasher, pried off everything that was in my way, pressed the torn part back together, and pumped in a bunch of JB Weld to make it impossible for the rip to get bigger. I’ll post a photo.

This worked great until this summer. Then the panel ripped in three other places. Parts came completely loose and fell off.

This is the problem with strengthening bad products. When you reinforce an area that has failed, often, you’re just sending the problem to another area that hasn’t been reinforced. The reinforced area will hold up just great, so the flimsy bits will yield. Put a stiff boot on to protect your ankle, and when you stumble, you’ll rip your knee apart because your ankle can’t move. That’s the principle.

I managed to find a new panel for $80. Today I took the old one out, found the places where it ripped, and applied globs of JB Weld to the new one in the same areas. I have the toughest Bosch dishwasher control panel on Earth. It’s probably the only one which is really adequate.

I knew the new panel would be garbage, and it would fail just like the old one. I fixed it so it would fail much, much later.

I have a Hercules angle grinder from Harbor Freight. This is not a snooty Germany company like Bosch. Harbor Freight is a budget tool seller, and Hercules is its top line of budget tools. The grinder is magnificent. If you open it up, you will find very thick glass-reinforced plastic. I think I paid $59. Why can’t Bosch put 3/16″-thick plastic in an expensive dishwasher? Why is there no glass in the dishwasher panel?

I think I paid $78 for the Bosch grinder with the bad cord. It had a motor, heavy steel gears, a tough case, a complicated switch, a guard…how can a crummy, embarrassingly bad dishwasher panel cost the same amount?

The Hercules grinder’s case will last forever. It is nearly indestructible. Same thing goes for a lot of my power tools. Probably even Bosch tools. The Bosch angle grinder looked very tough inside.

The Hercules grinder has a really nice cord, Bosch. I will probably never be able to buy a replacement cord, because it’s Harbor Freight, but then I won’t need one.

Bosch can make a drill with a tough case, but somehow they can’t make a dishwasher with a glass-reinforced handle thicker than two millimeters. No, they made a choice, and the choice looks like an obvious effort to limit the lifespan of an otherwise-durable product.

Meanwhile, they’re probably playing the green game in their ads and on their website. Yes, I’m looking at it now. “Carbon neutral” since 2020. As if it were really possible to be carbon neutral. The whole idea is a farce. Fly your private jet to St. Bart’s for the weekend, but plant two banana trees in Madagascar. No, sorry. The correct thing, if you actually care about carbon, is to plant the trees and skip St. Bart’s.

Making dishwashers that last 5 years instead of 15 years is not green, Bosch. Throwing out a perfectly good dishwasher with a bad handle is not green.

I guess all the big manufacturers are hypocrites. I just bought a new washer for a tenant because the company that made the old one decided to quit making timers. The company is Hotpoint, which is General Electric, which is Haier, which is Chinese. The Chinese own General Electric now. Nice. I’ll know the end is here when they buy Coca-Cola and Harley-Davidson.

Haier has a bunch of stuff on its site about how it loves the environment. I’m totally convinced. The environment loves it when you stop making a $20 timer so you can sell a new $600 washer.

I guess I’m blowing the lid off major stories here. “Blogger Learns Company Makes Bad Products Intentionally.” “Florida Man Shocked to Find Hypocrisy Among Green Corporations.” I’ll probably be contacted by major news organizations. No one saw these scoops coming.

Don’t be afraid to improve products you own. You may be a better engineer than you think. There are lots of really bad engineers out there, and there are lots of products that are bad because of accounting decisions. Sometimes a tube of glue or a couple of new wires can make a product way better than it was when it left the factory.

I’m not afraid to wash dishes now. Fear is gone. Now I’m back to plain old laziness. Hooray.

I Get It

I have more input on Starlink Junior, my new ISP.

I put the dish up last week, and I have been doing speed tests. I put the dish in my old Dish dish mount, and then I rigged up a dubious pole to raise the dish another 8 feet.

Sometimes my download speed goes up to around 60 megs. Usually, it’s closer to 10. It has tested as low as three. The high figures are way better than anything I get from AT&T, the company from which my old connection was bought. The low figures aren’t much worse than the performance AT&T provides when things aren’t going well. AT&T doesn’t seem to like heavy rain.

Uploads with Starlink are pretty bad. I have seen 15 Mbps, but I think three is more typical.

I still think I’ll hold onto Starlink. It should improve, and the more time I spend online, the more it seems smoother and more reliable than AT&T. The old upload speeds I got were pathetic, so Starlink uploading doesn’t seem like a downgrade.

Musk needs to provide more help with locating dishes. They should send people out to look around. I have to guess where to put the dish. The phone app that detects obstructions doesn’t really work.

Should I turn my dish a little to the right or left? I don’t know. Should I put it on the other side of the house? Should I buy a 50-foot tower?

The Starlink stuff is like the monoliths in 2001. You can’t ask it questions. It just sits there and does what it wants. No explanations. No manual.

I feel like I bought an Apple product or a German car. “SHUT UP! We do the thinking for you! It’s good enough for you!”

Starlink somehow relies on cell networks to do uploads. I can’t find good information on how this works. At first, I thought maybe it was downloading straight from satellites and uploading to local cell towers, but that can’t be right, because Speedtest tells me it’s uploading to places like Gainesville and Atlanta. It appears I am sending uploads to space, and from there they go to ground stations. If this is true, then why are uploads so slow?

Is my little dish too weak to shoot a good signal up to the motherships, or are the motherships slow when they shoot my data down to the ground stations? No idea.

Speaking of German cars, my friend Mike continues to have fun with the Mercedes lemon he bought.

This thing has been going into “limp mode” for something like a year, for no discernible reason. Mercedes dealerships can’t figure it out. He has spend a lot of money on parts. Right now, he’s visiting New Hampshire, and he has no car because the wiring caught fire.

They’re telling him he may need a new wiring harness, and the cost would be $20,000. For wires. The car only cost him $27,000. He doesn’t know the whole story, because the dealership that has the car won’t get to it until Tuesday. Is it possible to get a wiring harness during Biden’s reign of inflation and shortages? No idea. What if they have to keep the car a month?

He took a trailer with him. He was going to fill it with his belongings and bring it down here. If the work takes a month, what happens to the trailer? And where is he supposed to stay?

I do not like German cars. They are as overrated as Wonder Woman and The Black Panther. They are very unreliable, working on them is a nightmare, and parts are astoundingly expensive.

I don’t know why people think the Germans are good at engineering. They’re not. They do a very good job of making things that don’t work. Making things cute and clever and pretty is only part of engineering. The primary goal is to make them practical, so German engineers are not very good, regardless of how impressive their products are when they work.

This is not new. Porsche lost the contract for the Tiger tank. Another company built a competing prototype, and Porsche’s prototype–a hybrid (seriously)–broke down and got stuck during the trials. The competitor offered to use its tank to pull the Porsche free.

Oh, yeah. There is no substitute.

Daimler-Benz made the Panzer, and it helped lose the war for the Germans because it was always in the shop. I’m not kidding. Look it up. When Panzers broke down, they were a nightmare to fix, but a tank crew could replace a Sherman engine in the field in a few hours. Shermans ran. The disparity is one reason we were able to field more tanks. People say the Panzer was better than the Sherman, but Shermans obliterated a whole lot of Panzers, as did Soviet T-34’s. Allied tanks proved better in terms of winning wars.

Incidentally, it’s not true that Shermans burned easily. It’s a myth. And the crew of a burning Sherman could escape in less than 5 seconds. To get out of a burning Panzer, you had to fill out forms, have them stamped by the local burgermeister, mail them to Berlin…well, not really, but it took a very long time, so you were just about certain to be burned to death.

The Japanese do better than the Germans. The Germans will never be able to match Toyota engineering. A Porsche can go around the Nurburgring faster, but the Toyota will go around it 23,000 times with basic maintenance, and the Porsche will be lucky to complete 5 laps.

Mike’s battery died the other day, and I helped him replace it. Guess where they put it? Under the passenger seat. You can’t fully expose the battery hole without removing the seat. Mercedes didn’t put a strap on the battery to lift it out of the hole, so there was no way to grip it. We had to cut slits in the carpet to move it. No joke.

I replaced two batteries in my big Dodge in less time.

Maybe I’ve written about the Mercedes before. Can’t recall. I really do not like German cars.

Another friend of mine bought a used Mercedes, and she liked it because it was cheap. Then it needed a trivial repair, and she couldn’t afford it. The parts cost too much.

This, incidentally, is why you don’t buy a $5000 vintage Bentley.

Or any BMW Mini Cooper.

If German cars were any good, they would hold their value, and they don’t. Mike’s car had low miles when he bought it, and his $70,000 vehicle only cost $27,000. What does that tell you? I can get most of what I paid for my diesel Dodge, and I bought it in 2009, 13 years ago. It has three times the mileage it came with. Doesn’t matter.

It’s worth a lot more than Mike’s $70,000 2014 diesel Mercedes with lower mileage. Think about that.

Musk needs to communicate with customers. Oddly, by making Starlink a product that does everything itself, he has made it necessary for customers to do things they shouldn’t have to do.

I found out about splicing the Starlink cable. It’s just standard Cat5 data cable, covered in a rubber sheath and imprisoned in Musk’s cruel proprietary connectors.

It’s really dumb. If Musk had done things right, he would have used plain old Cat5 connectors and made things easier for everyone. No, in a quest for needless control, he made his own connectors, which are probably patented so no one can sell them cheaper except the Chinese.

Because of what he did, running a cable through a wall requires a 1″ hole instead of a 1/4″ hole.

Or does it?

Being a clever person, I am not afraid to cut Musk’s cable and splice it myself. You just sever it and put your own Cat5 connectors on the cut ends. You can’t connect it to the dish or router without modifying them, but you can run it right through a 1/4″ hole, and you can add all the length you want. You can even cut into existing cables already present in your house.

Take that, Tesla Boy.

If you want to know how to splice Starlink cable, go to Youtube and find out.

I already have the things I need to do my splicing, so I’m going to cut the cable and run it through my obsolete cable TV hole.

I don’t know of any way to hardwire the router to my existing Ethernet wiring, but I’ll be looking into it. Wireless everything is inferior to hardwired everything. Wireless connections are a downgrading concession to reality. If hardwiring were always practical, no one whose data and speed were important would have any interest in wireless.

If you could put a wire on your phone, your calls would never drop, and your speeds would be incredible.

I installed my first wireless printer yesterday, which is why I posted a crabby rant about new tech products. The installation should have taken 10 minutes, but Brother turned it into a painful ordeal lasting over an hour.

Anyway, one less cable to deal with, and now I can scan things without going to my office.

Brother put a ridiculous password on my printer, and I had to use it more than once. I had to turn the printer over, put on my reading glasses, read the tiny password label, and transcribe the password to a file so I wouldn’t have to turn the printer over any more.

Here is my printer password: password. Want to hack it? Knock yourselves out. I wanted to forgo a password or use “1,” but [Big] Brother wouldn’t let me.

If you can get close enough to my house to get a printer signal, you can print whatever you want, but don’t forget that wireless range is a lot smaller than rifle or pistol range, and you will be well within Florida’s open-season-on-trespassers radius.

I can bury you in 10 minutes. I have a tractor.

It’s time to go ahead and do the splice so I can shut my upstairs window and run the Starlink cable through a hole. Then I’ll probably find out I put the dish on the wrong side of the house.

Dishing on Starlink

I feel like updating my Starlink experience.

Today my dish arrived, and as I wrote earlier, I was not as thrilled as I hoped to be when I first gave Elon Musk my deposit. The price had gone up, the promised speed had gone way down, the arrival of faster speeds had been pushed way back, and the installation turned out to be a pain.

Since then, I have fired Starlink up, and I believe I will keep it. I’m not sure yet, but it looks like Starlink Junior, the version I have, is somewhat better than my old wireless system, and it’s cheaper.

When you open the Starlink box, you get two things that matter. The dish and the router. The dish has a cord 75 feet long, and it has molded-in plugs on both ends, so you can forget about splicing it. I think. You plug your router into the wall, plug the dish into the router, and wait.

The only instructions are 4 cartoons on the packaging material, so if you think I’m oversimplifying the instructions, you are wrong. When I say “cartoons,” I mean one-panel cartoons. And there is no text to speak of.

Before you choose a location for the dish, you’re supposed to start the phone app and use it to take video of the sky above. How this is supposed to tell Starlink anything useful, I don’t know. I moved the phone around a lot while I was doing it. I can’t imagine what Starlink thought. The purpose of the exercise is to determine whether you have too many obstructions for the signal to get through.

Using the phone takes a long time, and Starlink doesn’t tell you how you’re supposed to hold the phone over your head without getting tired. It also doesn’t tell you how to know when you’re done without holding the phone over your head. The camera has to point at the sky, so you have to be under the phone to read the app, and the app is what tells you you’re finished.

I stuck the dish next to the pool. I had read that it would want a desert-like location with no features other than flat horizons. Figuring that was BS, I decided to try the worst but most convenient location first. If it worked well enough by the pool, I would leave it there.

Of course, it worked poorly, so I climbed out an upstairs window, removed my Dish dish with primitive tools, and hurled it down into the yard. I stuck the Starlink dish in the pole it had occupied, with no real attachment. If a bird sits on it, it will move.

When I went inside and turned on the PC to see if I had a new network showing up, Starlink sort of took over and sent me to a page that did what the phone app was supposed to do, except for the video stuff. I learned I had a new network named “Stinky.”

Really? Is that a good joke, coming from a man named Musk?

I changed the name of the network to something like Trump-o-rama and started trying to use the web.

Since then, I have used an Internet speed test a few times, and my downloads are ranging between 8 and 55 megs. That means they’re way better than my old system when they’re fast, and they’re about the same when they’re bad.

Uploads are not quite as exciting. Sometimes they’re a lot better than they used to be, but I have gotten figures as low as 0.25 megs. Maybe I’ll only be able to upload Youtubes when the wind is blowing the right way.

We are having wonderful dry weather, but fortunately, it rained today, and I was still able to use Starlink, so there’s one question answered.

I went to Ace Hardware and got eight feet of galvanized tubing. For some reason, tubing for fences costs $30 at Home Depot and $17 at Ace. I modified it so it could be attached to my old Dish dish mount, and I’m in the process of painting it with truck bed coating. That will look marginally better than bare zinc. I plan to add 8 feet to the height of the dish, and I’ll fasten it to the pole with hose clamps.

Elon, or as I call him, Stinky, decided not to make his cables spliceable, so it looks like running them into the house will require holes as big as the plugs. I haven’t found a way to cut a cable, thread it through a small hole, and reattach it. Right now, the plan is to try to use the old Dish hole. I haven’t seen it yet because I don’t want to lie on my back on the roof in the rain, but I’m hoping it’s big enough to take Stinky’s plug.

All in all, things look promising. If upload speeds can be improved by raising the dish, I will be all set.

What Stinky has done is extremely impressive, regardless of the little issues. A lot of people around the world can now open a box, run an app, and have acceptable or possibly excellent Internet coverage in an hour or two. This is now possible in places where Internet coverage didn’t exist before Stinky. If you don’t think it’s impressive, consider all the huge corporations that have utterly failed where he has succeeded. They didn’t even see the need for his kind of system.

He’s going to murder Hughes. Their systems don’t perform as well, and getting help from the their customer service has been compared to trying to text the pope.

He should make a better effort to communicate with customers. That would be helpful.

I’m not sure about the non-spliceability of the cables. I’m checking it out. If it turns out splicing is possible, the odds I will return my dish will go down like Stinky’s estimates of my download speeds.

If You Can See Your Floor, You’re Okay

Looks like today will be a day of waiting and preparation. Waiting for my burglar alarm company to show up and give me 4G. Waiting for the wife to call after some errands. I was also supposed to be waiting for Elon Musk to show up with a package from Starlink, his rural Internet company, but it looks like he will be dropping by tomorrow. I assume he drives the trucks personally.

Non-Tesla gasoline- and diesel-powered trucks, but let’s not go there.

While I’m sitting here, I’m admiring my new Doyle precision pliers and thinking about admitting I’m a tool collector.

I have a drawer full of pliers and other hinged tools. Side cutters. Scissors. A tool for making fishing leaders with heavy mono and cable. Stuff like that.

I have two shops. Obviously, there is the big one in the detached building. I also put a bench, a table, shelves, and a fair assortment of tools in my former dining room. Who wants to walk to the big shop every time something needs fixing?

I am forcing myself to confront the fact that the dining room needs to be reclaimed. As great as it is to have a dining room full of tools, I am duplicating things more than I should, and I have difficulty deciding which tool goes in which shop. I guess I should also mention the fact that my wife will probably want a dining room.

Should I put the second-tier stuff indoors, or should I put the good stuff there because it will never rust? Should I put all the electronics stuff indoors because doing electronics indoors just feels right, or should I put it in the big shop because sometimes electronics work involves tools I don’t want to put in the house?

I have to figure out what to do with my small pliers.

Around 28 years ago, I started buying a few tools, and I assumed Craftsman and Stanley had to be wonderful because I had heard the names so often. I got myself two pairs of Stanley needle nose pliers. I got a small pair and a tiny pair.

Tool people like me are always looking for the best manufacturers. It’s hard to resist becoming a snob. I now know that Stanley wasn’t always making great tools back when I got my pliers. I have looked for better ones. But the tiny Stanleys are wonderful. The jaws meet up correctly, I have never managed to damage them, they cut whatever I want to cut, and because the jaws are very long and skinny, they will do stuff a lot of pliers won’t do.

I wanted a similar pair so I could have the same great experience in both shops. I couldn’t get old Stanleys, and I don’t trust the new ones.

I found out it’s not simple buying needle nose precision pliers. A lot of them come without cutters or jaw serrations. Smooth jaws are supposed to avoid marring work. Needle nose pliers without cutters seem inadequate to me, but once I learned they existed, I figured they had to exist for a reason, therefore I needed them.

What did I end up buying? One pair of Pro American pliers. Three pairs of Harbor Freight Doyle pliers. Two pairs of Engineer pliers from Japan. So I have 6 new pairs of small pliers now. This does not include my larger Channellock, DeWalt, Icon, and Stanley long nose pliers. It doesn’t include my water pump pliers, my Knipex adjustable pliers, my Engineer and DeWalt dikes, my non-marring Japanese pliers…

Engineer makes Vampliers which are sold in America at inflated prices. The Japanese versions are exactly the same except for labeling and colors, and they cost a lot less.

Vampliers are made to pull and turn fasteners that are hard to grip. They have weird jaws full of edges and points, and they will grab nearly anything. You may have seen them in TV commercials. They really work, but there is no point in paying the American price.

I bought Engineer needle nose plies with smooth jaws as well as long nose pliers with cutters and serrations. The long nose pliers aren’t as needly.

I decided to try the Doyle pliers because Harbor Freight now makes some really excellent tools, and many are pretty cheap. I wanted to see if Doyle products were any good.

It’s not accurate to say Harbor Freight makes them. I don’t think they make anything. At least in some cases, when you buy Harbor Freight pliers with different names on them, you’re buying things made by different companies. In a way, then, Doyle may be a completely legitimate brand, as is Quinn, their next step down.

Harbor Freight sells Icon now, and Icon is supposed to be their answer to Snap-On. I decided to buy myself two big pairs of extended pliers to see what they were like. I’m not all that impressed. They seem sturdier than Chinese pliers from Home Depot, but the metal finishing is somewhat clumsy. Snap-On gets a lot of mileage out of the appearance of its tools, so to compete with Snap-On, you should make tools with nice finishes.

The Doyle pliers are a nice surprise. The fit and finish are very nice. They seem reasonably hard. The steel doesn’t scratch easily. They work smoothly. They have springs. The cutters close correctly.

One pair has one jaw that seems a little larger than the other, as though a grinding procedure wasn’t completed as well as it could have been, but it doesn’t affect the way the pliers work.

For 12 bucks or whatever, the set seems like a real bargain. One pair of Engineer pliers runs around 17 dollars. Engineer pliers are meticulously finished, but I don’t think they will work better.

I ordered an old pair of 5″ Pro-America pliers from Ebay just to see what they were like. Pro-America is supposedly a company that has done most of its business with the government, so most people don’t see their tools often. It’s also called Kal Tool. People say their tools are very nice. I thought a tool from a company like that would be an interesting curiosity.

I have quit trying to justify my pliers and other hand tool buys. The truth is, I just like having them. People collect a lot of stupid things, so why not collect tools, which are useful? I plan to keep buying whatever seems interesting, whether I really need it or not.

I can’t figure out what to do with my electronics stuff. If I move it to the workshop, I will have to find a way to store it. I have a power source, a powered breadboard, a couple of meters, two soldering irons, a bunch of leads, a ton of components, surgical clamps, two oscilloscopes, and probably other things I can’t think of right now.

This leads to an inevitable question: do I buy a SEVENTH rolling tool chest?

I’ve been watching shop organization videos, and I learned something interesting: storing things on walls or in the open is stupid.

This is heresy in tool circles. People love putting up pegboard and hanging their tools on it. They like drawing little tool outlines to show them where to put things. They like French cleats. I don’t care. It’s stupid.

If you hang things on your wall, you end up with several problems.

1. You take up many times as much space as you would if you used boxes.
2. You kill your wall space, so kiss shelves goodbye.
3. Your stuff gets dirty and rusty because it has no protection.
4. You have to do a lot of walking to get to things.
5. You can forget about moving your tools when you want to. You can’t roll a wall around.

My shop has two great big walls and 4 smaller ones. The doors eliminate a lot of wall space. If I were to take the stuff from one box and try to put it on the walls, I would lose an entire large wall. That’s dumb. Walls are the best places for shelves.

If I used the wall, A lot of my tools would be 20 feet or more away from my main bench. That makes no sense.

It’s also dumb to put things right where you can grab them, uncovered, unless you really need to. Dust and crud will fall on them. They may get damaged when things fly around the shop. They make the shop look disorderly. If you have 10 tools you use over and over, having them out all the time is great, but the rest should be in boxes.

Boxes and shelves are the skyscrapers of workshops. They multiply what you can do with limited square footage.

Right now, I have two boxes full of my most useful tools within 5 feet of my bench. If I need a tool, I turn around, open a drawer, and take it out. No walking. No getting on a stool to reach something 8 feet up on the wall. No reaching around the chests or freestanding tools to get at things behind them.

Resist the urge to cover your walls with tools. If you own more than 20 pounds of hand tools, you will regret putting them on the wall.

I have some things on my walls, and I have some other things hanging on the fronts of shelves, but I am determined to minimize that stuff.

Here’s another helpful suggestion: use drawer organizers, but don’t buy the ones they sell in stores. They cost a lot, they take up a lot of room, they weigh a lot, and they force you to do things their way.

I found a great video about organizing wrenches. Many wrenches come with special plastic trays that have little arms that hang onto them. The trays put the wrenches an inch or so apart, and you can’t put additional spots in the trays. Bad. The video showed how you can buy solid wire and turn it into wrench organizers that will take any configuration you like. I’ll post it.

I put 17 wrenches in a wire loop organizer I made, and suddenly, a drawer that had been full of wrenches was more like 1/3 full. The wrenches were arranged by size, making them easy to find, and unlike plastic organizers, the loops didn’t force me to yank wrenches loose. They come right out.

Wire is not cheap right now, but it’s not prohibitively expensive, either, and you can save money by buying romex, stripping it, and using the individual wires. I’ve spent $30, and I don’t think I’ll need to spend more soon.

Ever wondered why tool chest drawers can hold 100 pounds each? Now you know. If you organize, you can get a lot of mass into a drawer.

Now, what about tool chest drawer liners?

This is a sore spot with me.

Tool chests have to have liners. Period. Tools slide around on metal, and they remove the paint and cause rust. Then you have dirty rusty tools in your hands all day. You need liner material that provides cushioning, wears well, doesn’t accumulate debris, and won’t eat plastic.

Yes, some tool drawer liners eat plastic. One of the most popular liner materials is a foam product that looks sort of like a mat woven from 3/16″ black rubber cords. Like many rubbery products, it’s made with one or more solvent. When you put certain types of plastic on it, the solvent or solvents dissolves the surface of the plastic and leave a picture of the pattern of the liner material.

You should be able to line a typical 26″-wide chest for a few dollars, but companies that sell liner material jack the price up. They will take a material which is sold cheaply for other purposes and multiply the price by three or 4.

I found some solutions. Some people buy cheap yoga mats and cut them up. They’re actually better than many liners. One guy uses astro turf, which works very well. Treadmill and exercise mats work.

I turned a Harbor Freight chest into a welding cart a year or two back, and then I left a drawer open, not knowing how mice think. They moved in and starting eating drawer liners. Not knowing they were in there, I closed the drawer one day, causing them to die of thirst, rot, and stink up the chest and my tools. They also used the chest as a toilet, to a copious degree.

I bought myself a new roll of Harbor Freight liner, thinking that and some serious cleaning would fix the problem. Well, it didn’t. The drawers are about 20″ deep, and Harbor Freight’s rolls of liner are 16″ wide. I was not happy to find that out.

Here’s what I learned later: Lowe’s sells Kobalt liner rolls something like 20″ wide. Perfect. And they impregnate it with Zerust, a chemical which will discourage rust for a few years. The price isn’t bad, either. I got a big roll that solved my problem for $20. Actually, I bought two rolls, thinking they weren’t as big as they were.

You could also paint the inside of your drawers with truck bed coating.

To get back to electronics, I have to come up with the answer. I can’t just dump all my things on shelves and hope for the best. Maybe one more US General chest is needed.

Speaking of shelves, I am still contemplating welding some up. I was discouraged when I found out what 1″ steel tubing costs now, but it’s not like spending $500 on a permanent major shop improvement is extravagant. A couple of days ago I blew $600 on a washing machine for a tenant, and I thought nothing of it. Why feel bad about spending on my home?

I think shelves would open up more space, making me feel more comfortable with buying another chest.

When the physical improvements are done, I may make some improvements involving data. I may make an inventory so I’ll know what I have. It sounds awful, but I could do it in two days. I have all sorts of screws and washers. I never know what’s here. Sometimes I buy things and then find out I already have them. Also, I need an inventory for insurance.

If I could go to my computer and look things up instead of walking around confused, it would be tremendous.

I’m also using a Brother label maker now. I hope to be able to stop opening and closing things so much. Just scan the labels and reach.

Today I watched an Adam Savage video about shop organization. I think his ideas are bad, because his shop is a rat’s nest. Tons of things are out in the open. He has a whole wall of movie memorabilia in illuminated IKEA cases. Why would you fill your shop with space-killing things that have little or nothing to do with tools? He has at least one rack of nerdy costumes he has made for himself. He goes to nerd conventions dressed as comic and movie characters. Costumes are not tools.

His problem is that he’s like me. He’s not really building a shop. He’s building a neat place to hang out. And he loves the tools and the shop more than he loves getting things done.

Anyway, he said something he thought was brilliant. He said that when you choose a location for something, you should pick the place you thought it was in the first place. If you want your PVC cutter, and the first place you look is the third shelf to the left of your drill press, when you finally find the PVC cutter, you should put it on that shelf. You will instinctively look for it there.

This is good advice, but it’s not that original. I’ve been doing this for years. Not that it has helped much, what with all the counterproductive things I’ve also been doing. Anyway, I’ll toss it out there as a good tip.

These are my thoughts on shop organization at the moment. I hope they age well.

And another pair of Engineer pliers is arriving Saturday.

How Much of That Cheese is Real?

This morning, I watched Youtube with breakfast. As time passes, seems like there is less and less content I like. I decided to watch Adam Savage’s channel.

Savage is the nerdy store clerk from the old Charmin commercials. He and Mr. Whipple amused America with their clever banter. You probably know him as one of the hosts of the show Mythbusters.

He has some tool skills. He has worked in special effects, and he has built various things for movies and, I would guess, TV shows.

Wikipedia says:

Savage has worked as an animator, graphic designer, carpenter, projectionist, film developer, television presenter, set designer, toy designer, and gallery owner. He worked as a model maker on the films Galaxy Quest, Bicentennial Man, Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, The Mummy, The Matrix Reloaded, and Space Cowboys, among others.

I’ll go out on a limb and opine that he wrote that himself. It looks like something you would put on a resume. The language is vague, and the writer is trying to puff him up.

If you, personally, design the CGI software used in a groundbreaking project like The Abyss, you will put that in your list of accomplishments. You will say, “I designed that.” You won’t say, “I worked in the production of the special effects for The Abyss.” If you are vague about what you did, it means you didn’t do all that much. Maybe you fetched doughnuts for the people who did the real work on a movie. Maybe they sent you to Radio Shack when they needed resistors. Maybe you held things while they welded them. Savage, or some other Wikiperson, says he has “worked as an animator, graphic designer,” et cetera, but he doesn’t tell you what he did.

I don’t know why I’m inconsistent with my use of Italics. I just am.

I can write a Wikipedia and call myself a patent attorney whose work has appeared before the federal courts, the Patent and Trademark Office, and the Library of Congress. I can call myself an experienced litigator. I can say I’m a fabricator, and that I have designed and created a number of useful and somewhat complicated weldments. I can say I’m a composer. A writer. But should I really say those things?

I don’t practice law any more, and I would want to brush up before handling new cases. I have litigated, but not in a long time. I really am a fabricator, but I can barely TIG, I don’t know much about sheet metal, and I’m not very good at stick welding. I have composed a bunch of tunes, but no one has paid me for them. I got some books and articles published, but I don’t live on writing income.

I could say I taught physics in one of the world’s leading university departments, but I was a teaching assistant, not a Ph.D.

Reading people’s lists of accomplishments is like reading grocery labels. For example, “Key West lime juice” means the juice of Persian limes, not key limes, but “key lime juice” means it’s the real thing.

Persian limes are the normal limes you are familiar with. People in South Florida call them Persian limes in order to set them apart from key limes, also known as Mexican limes.

Little tip for the yankees.

People who write food labels and copy are very deceptive. Guess what “made with 100% real cheese” means. It means, “Some of the cheese is real, but the rest is fake.” The real cheese is 100% real, but less than 100% of the cheese is real.

I enjoy Savage’s videos, because he’s a tool guy, and he tells interesting stories about showbiz. He makes a lot of stuff. On the other hand, I have noticed that he does a lot of bad and mediocre work. A person who has been doing his kind of work for three decades should be better.

He does projects he calls one-day builds. One project was a brass nut and bolt. The bolt was supposed to be around 1.5″ thick, so you can imagine how big the nut was supposed to be. These objects served no purpose except to give him something to do.

He made lots of mistakes. He butchered the bolt, which should have been a simple project. He made a blank for it and held the head in his lathe’s chuck, unsupported at the tail end, and he tried to thread it using a carbide tool pushed straight in. He pushed the bolt out of the chuck several times, resulting in a lot of damage.

No real machinist, and no decent amateur, would have done these things. You make your blank. You center-drill the small end. You chuck the head and put a live center in the cavity you just drilled. This keeps the bolt from flying away when you apply pressure.

You don’t push your cutting tool straight into the work to thread it unless you know you can get away with it. You push it in at an angle so only one side of the tool is cutting. This reduces the pressure and gives a cleaner result. Carbide is a bad idea unless it’s really sharp. Steel is easy to put a good edge on.

Savage ended up with a nut and bolt, but they were not what he originally planned. He had to cut out a lot of brass in order to remove his mistakes.

He made a little cabinet for metal tooling. I guess it was around 10″ deep. It had drawers. He didn’t use drawer slides. Just grooves that slid on strips of wood. Of course, it didn’t work well, and it should have been obvious the design was bad. He ended up buying drawer slides and doing it over.

His shop is miniscule, and there isn’t much stuff in it. Maybe it’s small because it’s in San Francisco where real estate is expensive. He has a mill about like mine, the same table saw I have, a cheap Chinese lathe that looks to be a 14″ job, a hipster woodworking table which is unnecessarily pretty and clever, and a billion small tools stored in storage doodads he made. He also has a gas welding rig.

I am pretty sure my amateur shop is better than his pro shop. I have plasma, TIG, MIG, stick, a hydraulic press with an air jack, a heavy-duty finger brake, a bunch of woodworking tools…if I had to do a project with tools, I would take my shop over his without hesitation.

I considered these things today, and it made me think about impostor syndrome. Here’s what Wikipedia says about it: “a psychological occurrence in which an individual doubts their skills, talents, or accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud.”

Many people have impostor syndrome. On the other hand, there is Dunning-Kruger syndrome, which convinces stupid or inept people they’re much more capable than the rest of us.

I guess there are shades in between these extremes.

A lot of successful people seem closer to the Dunning-Kruger end. They create wondrous resumes they can’t really live up to. I don’t think they’re true Dunning-Kruger types, because they know they’re exaggerating, whereas a true Dunning-Kruger really believes he’s a genius.

It looks like I can do anything Savage can do, plus a bunch of things he can’t. He must be better at some things than I am, but I doubt he can do anything of which I am completely incapable. So, do I have impostor syndrome because I would never hold myself out as a real tool guru?

If I’m better than a recognized Hollywood special effects technician, maybe I’m closer to the real thing than I admit to myself.

Hollywood is an interesting place. It’s full of self-promoters. People show up there and claim they can do this and that, and they get hired whether they’re telling the truth or not.

A law school friend of mine decided she didn’t like law, so she asked my advice about a career change. She wanted to become a talent agent in Hollywood. Not long after, she showed up at the offices of Endeavor, then called the Endeavor Talent Agency. They represented lots of big names. They took her on, and she succeeded. She ended up working at Fox as some kind of executive. She has worked as a producer on 4 TV shows. She had no training for any of this.

She told me something about Hollywood. She said she heard it from other people there. They said, “No one here knows what they’re doing.” To make it there, people simply arrived and showed their willingness to take on projects. People who needed projects taken on, and who knew nothing about completing them, hired them. Eventually, things got done, and I suppose skills developed.

I guess that’s how Adam Savage got where he is.

There are lots of people on Youtube who can do things he will never be able to do. They make all sorts of stunning projects. But they’re not in Hollywood, telling people how great they are, so he has a Hollywood business and a name, and they don’t.

Some of these people develop skills and businesses extremely quickly. Over maybe 5 years, they’ll go from tiny machine tools in apartments to big shops with CNC stations. Adam Savage has not done that. He is probably not much better today than he was in 2000. I don’t think he has a gift for what he does. Just tremendous enthusiasm.

It’s all very interesting to me.

I’m not knocking him. Just assessing his real place in the food chain. I like his work, even if his projects aren’t always good. I’m also thinking about myself. I’m not great, but maybe I’m better than I think I am.

Today I have go to out and get back to work on my tractor brush fork attachment. I feel a little better about it. If Adam Savage can get Hollywood studios to pay him, I should be able to design and assemble a tractor attachment.

I See no Math

Here is my final update on Hurricane Ian: absolutely nothing happened here. A couple of buckets blew across the yard. We have had a long spell of continuous light rain, nowhere near the one-foot-plus we were supposed to get. That’s it.

Because hurricanes spin counterclockwise, a storm that passes you on the east will bring you hot, wet air at first and then cool, dry air from the north. That’s happening here now. We are set to have a glorious week of cool, dry weather. Unusually good for early October. Apart from the fresh crop of post-hurricane mosquitoes, things could not be better.

I don’t have regular TV, because I hate it. That means I am not seeing what everyone else in our TV-addicted nation is seeing. I only see little bits of it as they pop up while I look at the web. It wasn’t until last night that I started to see a lot of video about the destruction Ian did in other parts of Florida. I haven’t seen much of anything about Cuba.

Now that the storm is over for me, I am looking at stories about other places. Lee County’s sheriff is claiming hundreds of deaths. Can that really be true? In 2022, it’s not that easy for an American to die in a hurricane. The government knocks itself out providing transportation and shelters, and hurricanes generally aren’t that dangerous to begin with. The winds kill very few people. The big threat is storm surge, which can drown people who don’t evacuate. The people in Lee County knew the water was predicted to rise high enough to kill them, so it’s hard for me to believe hundreds of them chose not to move to high ground.

When you live inland, there is no such thing as storm surge, so the main danger from hurricanes doesn’t exist.

I didn’t expect anyone in the US to experience the kind of catastrophe the sheriff is talking about. I thought there might be a lot of property damage and economic loss, but I didn’t think anyone would drown. We know how to prevent that. Now I’m hearing that while I was having a pretty good time, grilling burgers and eating junk food, other people may have been drowning or waiting on rooftops for rescue boats.

Truthfully, I think it’s a big mistake to live in any hurricane-prone area. From Texas to the Carolinas, coastal people know they will get hit sooner or later. The pleasure of being near the water is not worth the unending flow of tense pre-hurricane vigils or the pain of cleaning up when storms actually hit.

I have been through Betsy, Katrina, Wilma, Rita, and Irma in one way or another, and I have also spent a bunch of weeks watching other storms that didn’t reach me. All in all, I wish I had been in Tennessee or some other nice place where people aren’t afraid of the weather.

The place where I live is about as unsafe as I can stand. We haven’t had hurricane winds since 1885, but we sometimes get tropical storm winds that cause serious inconvenience, and that’s bad enough. I would never accept a higher level of risk again. I would never live close to a coast.

My wife and I were discussing our pleasant fate today, and I had an interesting thought. In the Bible, people who knew they were in danger fasted and prayed. They repented and humbled themselves. They knew this was how to get God’s help. America is full of Christians who think they know the Bible, but virtually no one calls for repentance, prayer, and fasting when we face a threat.

I fasted and prayed because of the storm, and I came out fine. That shouldn’t surprise me. Why hasn’t every Christian done it? Many times I, myself, have failed to do it. How can we make such an obvious mistake?

Look at our teachers. They are at fault. The Catholics teach us to pray to statues, dead people who have no power, and a mere woman, and they tell us God rarely helps anyone. Cessationists tell us we have to work hard and fix our own problems because while Satan is happy to continue doing supernatural works, God has quit. Prosperity preachers teach us we get eternal security by raising our hands once in church, and they tell us God will make us rich for buying them jets. Almost nobody is teaching anything helpful, and most preachers are teaching lies that cripple us.

I don’t feel guilty about sailing through Ian without a care. I am supposed to receive blessings. It’s not something to feel guilty about. We are supposed to strive to receive and share God’s blessings. Why else would we worship Him? What would be the point? Feeling bad about being blessed makes no sense. You’re just getting what you asked for. Other people should ask, too.

Jesus paid for my help with his body and blood and kingdom. It’s terrible that so many other people had devastating outcomes, but I’m not responsible. I want to continue being blessed and protected, even if everyone else on Earth is destroyed. I pray for people and help them, and I want to see them get the best things they can, but sinking with them won’t help anyone.

Now I will get back to making my tractor attachment and making travel plans. I should be done with hurricanes for one year.