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Outer Bands — Why Now?
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Outer Bands

thunderstormWhile TS Cindy is more than 400 miles to the Southwest of me, the outer bands arrived at 11PM on Monday and it has been raining since then. There have only been a few spurts of heavy rain and not a lot of lightning, but after 36 hours it starts to get on your nerves.

We are on track to get between 4 and 6 inches of rain before this is over, which will easily drain away at my house, but the fools who hauled in fill dirt and top soil to grow grass are going to need to bail and ‘man’ the wet/dry vacs.

The header for my local forecast –

Active Advisory: Hurricane Statement (), Tornado Watch, Flood Warning, Flash Flood Warning, Coastal Flood Advisory, High Surf Advisory, Coastal Hazard Statement, Flash Flood Watch, Wind Advisory

Active Notice: Coastal Flood Advisory, High Surf Advisory, Coastal Hazard Statement, Flash Flood Watch

22 comments

1 Kryten42 { 06.22.17 at 2:57 am }

One of my other US friends sent a message last night that she’d been hit by one of the TS (she didn’t say which) and had over 13″ of rain in a short time. Though, she did say it was a relief from the heat!

Good luck m8. Stay *high & dry*. 😀

I guess your feral’s won’t be pleased. 🙁

2 Bryan { 06.22.17 at 9:54 am }

At this point there aren’t any more ‘ferals’ as the cats in the neighborhood are all associated with someone. That was the point of the ‘trap, neuter, release’ program, but even the full-time outdoor cats have plenty of places to go and stay dry with food available.

Cindy is the storm affecting the US, and will for a while as it pulls moisture out of the Gulf to dump on people. I’m on track for 6 inches. It all depends on drainage. During the very slow moving Georges in 1998 we got five days of constant rain that resulted in several feet of of precipitation, but it just drains through the sand back into the water table.

3 hipparchia { 06.22.17 at 5:01 pm }

you forgot the pollen alert. yes, along with all those others, we had a POLLEN ALERT.

4 Bryan { 06.22.17 at 8:47 pm }

How can you have a pollen alert when it’s raining like hell?

5 Kryten42 { 06.23.17 at 2:56 am }

Ummm… yeah?! 🙄

My friend Teresa msg’d me to say it was Cindy that hit them. She wants to house swap for the season. She prefers cold to hot & humid. 😆 Got down to 1c a couple nights the past week. Kitties are unimpressed! I Have 1 either side when I go to bed! I’m in a kitty straight-jacket! Grrrrr…

6 Bryan { 06.23.17 at 8:56 pm }

You need another cat to sleep on your chest and block your nose and mouth with her tail. 😉

7 Kryten42 { 06.24.17 at 2:18 am }

Oh… Missy does that! When i’m on my couch, she climbs up on my chest, shifts around a bunch of times to find *the spot* (usually paws over a shoulder & body across my throat) & purrs loudly in my ear. I’m obliged to cradle her with 1 arm & pat her with the other. While her feather duster tail swishes in my other ear and sometimes nose!

Mr. Kitty just sleeps on his blanket next to me on the couch & looks at the antics disdainfully. He doesn’t like being picked up. He’ll flip over for a tummy rub when Missie climbs up though. I need another arm!

Darned Cat’s! (hmmmm. There was a movie like that… “That Darned Cat” I think it was!)

8 Bryan { 06.24.17 at 9:34 am }

It was a Disney movie during the ‘Flubber’ and ‘Herbie’ era, [60s-70s?].

The ‘kneading’ routine when you are only wearing a t-shirt is also a lot of fun – if you are the cat.

Oh, well, back to rebuilding a bathroom…

9 Kryten42 { 06.24.17 at 1:23 pm }

That’s the one! I searched my DLNA server & found it. From 1965 with Haley Mills & Dean Jones. With a very handsome & smart Siamese kitty star named D.C. 😀

Missy has very sharp claws. Luckily, I bought a couple army surplus heavy woolen jumpers a few years ago for a bargain. They have canvas shoulder & elbow patches. Kitty proof! LOL

10 Kryten42 { 06.24.17 at 1:35 pm }

Oh! Meant to say a while ago… If you or badtux (or anyone) are interested, I put my current PC build up on overclock[dot]net a few Months ago (by request). Hard to believe it’s a year & a half old now! Old already. 😉 😆

Kryten42 6700K-Test build

If curious, click on parts for descriptions etc. 🙂

11 Bryan { 06.24.17 at 10:02 pm }

The US didn’t adopt those sweaters until after I got out, but the Brits and Canadians were wearing them in Germany. 🙁

Nice box. Too much machine for my purposes, but when you are gaming, you need the speed…..

12 Kryten42 { 06.25.17 at 3:46 am }

We have a lot of Army *surplus* gear available in recent years. Usually, they are old gear replaced by newer issue. But now some of it is current issue. Since Iraq & Afghanistan, the recruitment has dropped a lot. So, Military is flogging off surplus gear. Keeps the quartermasters busy & worth their pay I guess. 😆 *shrug*

I spend about a quarter of my time gaming, the rest converting hundreds of DVD & more recent BluRay movies & TV series etc. Just finished the 6 seasons (168 episodes) of Hogan’s Heroes (that took a couple weeks). Takes awhile to take an old 480 or 720p vid & upscale it to 1080p! I have great s/w that does an excellent job but even on a quad core / 8 thread i7 @ 4.6 GHz (or 4.8 for awhile, dropped it to 4.6 because the difference wasn’t worth the increase in temperature) it takes awhile. @ 4.6 GHz, the core temp’s never get above 60C, so the build works as I planned. Which is nice. 😉

I’m also creating some 3D models for a game I’ve had in mind for awhile. That also needs a powerful system & a ton of RAM (why I got 32 GB actually) & fast drives (I do the rendering on one of the 950 pro SSD’s), so constantly swapping large objects isn’t bottle-necked by the drive & SATA speed. 🙂

I picked up some good game dev s/w from Humble Bundle deals very cheaply. One was Clickteam Fusion 2.5 Suite that would have cost over US$1,300! I got it on Humble for $39. That’s very rare! However, that more of a long term project.

I’m working on simpler 2D game for Android/iOS/Win to fund the big one. 🙂 I got a good set of 2D game dev tools worth over $630 for $30. And the Gamemaker Studio bundle with all addons and exporter modules for Windows (all 95-W10), UWP (Universal Windows Platform), HTML5, Linux (including Ubuntu specific), Android, Mac & iOS. That was worth almost US$2,000 for $50 (I could have gotten it for $15, but part of the money goes to worthwhile charities so I added more for that).

Included: Spriter Pro + Game Effects Pack, Basic Platformer Pack, Run N’ Gun Pack, Adventure Platformer Pack, RPG Heroes Pack & Animated Art Packs. Also: Pyxel Edit, SpriteIlluminator, Lexaloffle PICO-8, Lexaloffle Voxatron. And GameMaker Studio Pro + Addons. All up, about $4,000 worth of game dev tools for less than $300, so why not?

I developed some games in the 80’s & 90’s, a couple were even fairly successful. Of course, the competition now is insane, bur in some ways that makes it easier. if one knows how to take advantage. 😉 😀 It’s slow going because of the health & other crap. but it gives me a focus & keeps me from finding a clock tower to vent my sometimes burning anger with. *shrug*

I honestly don’t know If I’ll actually release a game, or just use this for my own amusement. I’ll decide when the time comes. I don’t know if I need the hassle of supporting idiot customers. But the $$ would be nice. 🙂

13 Bryan { 06.25.17 at 10:31 am }

Support is so much fun 😉 Explaining why keeping floppies on a magnetic copy holder is a bad idea to new users. Then there were the 3½ diskettes that would get scrambled if they were near your garage door remote. There will always be people who can’t understand why putting a cellphone in rice or the oven of a gas stove will dry it out, but putting in a microwave will fry it [and the microwave]. These people and Windows have supported computer consultants for decades.

The joys of batch processing. The good old days when you couldn’t get any computer time at the end of months, quarters, and the business year because Finance was running its reporting. Your batch processing will at least produce something that won’t just get filed away after being glanced at once, and then shredded after the tax agency retention period has passed.

Keeping active when you don’t feel 100% isn’t easy, but it is necessary.

14 Kryten42 { 06.26.17 at 3:06 am }

Oh yes! Been through all that & more! I don’t miss any of it. Though, it does make for a good laugh over a beer with m8’s! 😉 😆

I read an interesting post in the Bitsum blog you might find interesting. 🙂 Something you’ve spoken about a few times. 😉 It’s a sobering read.

Why we should *demand* Fiber-To-The-X (Home, Premises)

We should do the same! In fact, we should demand the politicians pay back every $ of the NBN they screwed up & we do it properly!

15 Bryan { 06.26.17 at 10:20 am }

The telecoms don’t want to ‘compete’ with the government, but they don’t want provide the service because it would increase their costs… except, fiber requires less maintenance than coax. The telecoms want the profit and high share prices, and they can’t figure out that giving people what they want and need at a decent price guarantees both for decades. They are throwing away the future of their companies and the country to increase profits in the next quarter.

The Internet has become a utility, and utilities tend to be cheaper when they are owned and operated by local governments. The reason is the the ‘customers’ are the owners and can ‘fire’ management. Public/Private Partnerships all follow the same model – the Public gets the costs and the Private gets the profits.

16 Kryten42 { 06.26.17 at 4:35 pm }

Yeah… Same old… *shrug* Things rarely change.

So, the HMS Queen Elizabeth is beginning sea trials. Will be interesting. I’m amazed they got her out of the dock! It was a tight fit. 😆

Story & photo’s:

HMS Queen Elizabeth squeezes out of dockyard for the first time – and Russian spies are watching

I had to laugh when I read they are worried about Russian spy ships, sub’s & aircraft… But are only sending 1 frigate for the trials! Obviously, they can’t be too worried. Especially as they’ve posted plenty of photo’s of the construction. Like these:

HMS Queen Elizabeth – onboard the Royal Navy’s new warship, in pictures

17 Bryan { 06.26.17 at 9:31 pm }

The Russians looked at the photo gallery and figured out that the plans they hacked from BAE are worthless because they are for the the vessel that was proposed, not the one that was built. It will be a while before the F-35s for carriers are available so there’s no rush. I’m happy that France and Britain have carriers and can reduce the burden on the US carriers that Trump seems to want to send everywhere. What was the point of sending a carrier to the waters off of Korea? The Japanese and Koreans supply the US with bases, so the point escapes me.

I keep hearing clowns in Congress extolling the virtues of the ‘free market’. When you can only get a service or product from one vendor, there is no market.

18 Badtux { 06.27.17 at 1:38 am }

A Nimitz class carrier carries as many aircraft as will fit at our airbases in Korea, which are shared with the South Korean air force and thus their full capacity is not available to us. So if you expect war with North Korea, having a Nimitz in the area would definitely be handy. Japan is really too far away for fighter-bombers from Japan to attack North Korea. Our airbase in northern Japan was there to defend Japan against the Soviets, not to deal with North Korea. Japan could possibly be used to base B-1 or B-52 bombers in the event of war (Okinawa anyhow), but we’d probably keep flying them out of Guam and refueling them out of Okinawa. We’ve flown B-52’s out of Okinawa before, but the Japanese got annoyed when we blew up a huge hole in their island when one of our B-52’s crashed with a full bomb load, so we’ve kept them out of there since. And of course Guam is the only airbase we have in the area that has the special facilities needed for the B-2 bomber…

All of which will hopefully remain theoretical.

Flying jump jets off the QE is going to be so bloody expensive. They could have put catapults on the thing for the price difference between F-18 Super Hornets and F-35B’s, and the bugs will haul a larger load further too. It’s not as if the UK is going to go charging into contested airspace anytime soon. That’s what the US exists for…

Regarding builds, I recently made some eBay scores to upgrade my old NAS system at home: Matched Pair Intel Xeon X5675 3.06GHz 12M Cache Hex Core Processor, and 48 gb of additional RAM. Total cost was $260. *WAY* cheaper than buying a new machine, and plenty of horsepower for a NAS / virtualization server, now that I’m up to 68gb of memory. Who needs more than 12 cores / 24 threads for a home NAS anyhow? 🙂 I also scored a Dell PowerConnect 5524P POE 24 port Gigabit Managed Layer 3 Switch 2 SFP+ ports to take the place of both my POE switch and my 10gbit switch (since I have only two machines with 10gbit Ethernet — the NAS, and my gaming machine). I’m now using 1/3rd the power for my switches that I was using before — the 24-port 10gbit switch uses 120 watts all by itself! I still have the 10gbit switch in the rack though in case I ever need it again, though. Unplugged, of course!

19 Kryten42 { 06.27.17 at 12:32 pm }

Seems to be the thing to make silly decisions in the military. Like our new Sub’s. *shrug* What’s new?

It’s always good to get some great deals. I’ve been very lucky. I know I’ve saved over $10k the past decade alone. The little Seagate 4-bay NAD + 4x 5 TB NAS HDD’s for about AU$1,500 was a steal. I really wanted the 6-bay, but they only had 10 & sold out by the time I was ready to order. Was on special too for only $180 more. Had a faster controller & double the RAM. Oh well. I’m pretty happy with this. 😀 I still have the Enterprise Buffalo NAS, but it’s mainly used for backups from this NAS & my systems. Way overkill for that! Especially since I upgraded the 12 SAS HDD’s to the HGST Ultrastar 7K600 (HUS726060AL4211) 6TB drives when I built this PC. I sold the 10 2TB Ultrastar’s that were in it on eBay. Did fairly well actually. 🙂

Only network gear I got was a 4-port gbit PCI-E card (same as in my server) & fast 8-port switch with a 10Gb SFP+ FO module. So I only have a single cable to run to my *office* (the spare bedroom) where my main switch/router/server NAS etc are. Even though this MoBo has 2 e’net ports, they are different & can’t be teamed (intel & a crappy expensive Killer). MoBo makers are morons! Oh, I did add a PCIe card to the Buffalo (has 2 PCIe slots) that supports 2x 4-lane NVMe SSD’s (supported by the controller & s/w on the Buffalo of course). I had planned to move the 2x 512 GB 950 Pro drives from the PC to that as a fast cache & get a pair of 960 Pro 1 TB SSD’s for this workstation. But I’m in no hurry now. Maybe the 970 Pro 2 TB will be available for the price of a 1TB by the time I am! 😆 The 960 PRO 1 TB costs the same now as the 950 PRO 512 GB did when I got them Dec. 2015 (AU$550). the 2TB is about $1,200! Though, the little Segate NAS is getting full… just over 9 TB already. But a lot of that was data I’d archived onto DLT & DVD/BR’s over the years & 2D/3D gfx files I’ve been working on which can get quite large. It has just over 14 TB available, so not a crisis yet. 😉 It’s just convenient, why I got it.

Best made plans… 😉

20 Badtux { 06.27.17 at 8:22 pm }

My NAS is just running straight Centos 7 combined with ZFS On Linux. I’ve tried all the pre-canned software and don’t like any of it, none of it is flexible enough for me.

21 Kryten42 { 06.28.17 at 7:43 pm }

Yeah. I use CentOS 7 on my server & ZFS when i had a RAID there. No need for RAID on that now. My 2 NAS’s have been very good. Happy with their h/w & s/w. They do what the manufacturers said & what i got them for. I wish everything was that way. Would make life a lot easier.

Now I have a problem suddenly on my Workstation. Had a couple BSOD “clock_watchdog_timeout” crashes. Being Windoze crappy error reporting, I tracked the actual error to “WHEA_UNCORRECTABLE_ERROR (124)” bugcheck. “This bug check indicates that a fatal hardware error has occurred. This bug check uses the error data that is provided by the Windows Hardware Error Architecture (WHEA).” This is usually a hardware fault (CPU or MoBo) or it can be caused by some BIOS update s/w like Gigabyte @BIOS or Asus AI-Suite, or s/w that interacts w/ & BIOS but I haven’t used those since I built the system. Still looking into it. I do have a couple monitor/management s/w running in background that can modify BIOS on the fly (CPU Management mostly, but also fan’s), like the Corsair LINK s/w, which is known to have been a problem on older versions. But it’s been good for a year. *shrug*

This only happens on W10 so far. Though I don’t use W7 or CentOS a lot these days. I’ll reinstall W10. Been wanting a clean reinstall anyway. But I have a lot of s/w to reinstall, some will be a PITA to do. Oh well…

22 Bryan { 06.29.17 at 9:21 am }

The carrier carries an air wing of two FA-18 squadrons, while Osan AB has a wing with an F-16 squadron and an A-10 squadron and Kunsan AB as a wing of two F-16 squadrons. There is more support from Yokota, Misawa, and Kadena. Osan also has a U-2 squadron and everyone except Kunsan should still have elements of my old outfit. They have deployed B-1s to Korea, but that may have only been for a joint training exercise.

We have a lot of people who rotate to and from Osan at Eglin.