efaardvark
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Everything posted by efaardvark
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A bit on the warm side. (This is outside temp. I think it is hotter here inside since the car has been sitting in the sun all day.)
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I don't really have a favorite rodent but looking at pictures of quokka - aka the world's happiest animal - does tend to make me happy.
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Apocalypse Bringer Mynoghra. Adding it to the post-season watch list.
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Sounds like it might be one of the "certain scientific" series, probably "accelerator". The guy, "Accelerator" had been in a fight and his nervous system was damaged, requiring a sort of pacemaker to keep his brain functional. The girl was Misaka Mikoto. She had had some of her cells collected under false pretenses and the cells were used without her knowledge to make thousands of clones who were forced to fight the Accelerator to the death to level him up.
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I live in southern California so yeah, I've been thru a few. We just had a good clunker a few days ago in fact. Your description probably means you were pretty close to the epicenter of the quake and/or that it was closer to the surface. A lot depends on the type of ground between you and the quake. Rocky ground will transmit the sharper sounds and motions for longer distances than soils or gavels. But in general the closer you are the "clunkier" they feel. As you get more distance between you and the center the "smoother" things feel. If you're close then the motions will be sharper, the shaking more like a rattle, and the sounds more like pounding or grinding. You're literally hearing mountain-sized chunks of rock crashing into each other. As you get further away the sharpness and rattling smooth out into a more rolling or rocking feel and the sounds from the ground itself will mostly go away. If you hear anything it will more likely be local sounds of the house creaking or things falling over or off a shelf somewhere nearby.
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Breakfast was an egg-white omelet w/ bacon bits, cheese, onion, and garlic. Lots of garlic and onion. Be glad I can’t breathe on you. Breakfast was kinda late so no real lunch. Just a soda and a dark chocolate cherry Kind bar.
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Checking out the new solar project. No smoke or fire when the sun came up. Always a good sign. Looks like everything is working as expected. Plenty of sun this morning. At this rate the battery should be charged by noon. I’ve got my 2 refrigerators and my coffeemaker plugged in to the inverter. (You can tell I’m all-in with this project. Both the beer and the morning coffee are on the line here. ) With the battery fully charged it looks like I’ll get about 40 hrs of run time. More or less as expected. (Tech details hidden below.)
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The parts for a solar power setup (charge controller, battery, some cables & connectors, etc) have all finally been delivered so yesterday and today I put it all together. I have to reroof the house and I'll have to dismantle the old solar setup that's up on the roof now to to get that accomplished. That system was designed and built 25 years ago so I'm planning on upgrading it at the same time but I need to familiarize myself with all the new tech developed since then. That's what this new stuff is for. It's smaller and temporary compared to what's on the roof but it gives me some opportunity for hands-on experience with modern equipment so I know what to tell the solar guys to put back up once the roofing is done. Did a lot of reading of spec sheets and a bit of system design before ordering. Pretty sure I've got a working design and everything wired correctly. No blood or smoke or flames appeared during construction either. So far so good. Still a slight opportunity for mischance and pandemonium when the sun comes up and the electricity starts flowing through the system tomorrow morning though. Place your bets now. I'll let you know how it turns out.
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Welcome!
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Trying out a new beard to minimize the fur as we head into the summer weather.
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Got another shirt. Similar design to another one that I have but slightly different logo on the front. Gotta have one of each, right?
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What is your favorite anime Decade
efaardvark replied to Kirika_Madeleine's topic in Anime Discussion
Pretty much the same here. I started watching Americanized anime like Mazinger Z and Speed Racer back in the '60s and '70s when I was in gradeschool. I didn't even know what "anime" was back then. It was all Saturday morning cartoons. My interest has waxed and waned over the years depending on life events and anime content. I'm more interested in science fiction for instance so the current fantasy / isekai everything phase has a tendency to not hold my attention very well. My interest got a boost in the '80s when a HS classmate started doing voice acting. There was a good (IMHO) stretch back in the mid '90s when stuff like Ghost in the shell came out too. Hasn't reached that level since but I still find interesting stuff from time to time. Enough that I'm still here. If I haven't wandered off by now I kind of doubt I ever will. -
It's getting close to that point in the season when I do my 3-episode sampling. So far I've put Nyaight of the Living Cat, Solo Camping for 2, Food for the Soul, and Ruri Rocks on my list. Probably others as time permits. Anything else that strikes people as noteworthy this season? Also, I saw that the reincarnated vending machine got another season. Really? I'm not usually one to judge a book by it's cover but .. isekai? Reincarnation? As a vending machine??? I gave the first season a pass but maybe I missed the joke? Should I go back and take a look?
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Hay fever is killing me. Some sort of plant spore floating around en mass that’s messing with my nose and eyes. The stuff is also settling out everywhere, collecting on windowsills and in little balls in quiet corners and generally making a pest of itself.
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Horse with no Name
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Got a little electronic gadget to show the power going into my portable power station. The power station has about a 1kWh capacity and can be charged from solar but the input is only good for 15 amps. I can get up to 4kW from the solar panels on the roof. At 24 volts that’s up to 167 Amps but unfortunately the power station only shows the input in Watts. It doesn’t break it down to Volts and Amps. I can't tell when I'm getting close to (or over!) the 15 Amp limit. The power station does have input current protection so I'm not real worried about blowing something up but knowing when I'm hitting the amps limit will tell me things like if and how much solar power I'm wasting and from that give me an idea if maybe I should think about getting an extra battery for the power station and how big it should be. Or maybe just tell me that it wouldn't be worth it at all. So I got a little gadget to put inline on the wire connecting the panels to the power station to let me monitor things in a bit more detail.
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I saw a comment online that it isn't the price of gold (and silver) going up in dollars but the price of dollars going down in gold. It took a minute for my head to adjust to the concept and I wanted to see it graphically so of course I hit the the search engines. Strangely enough it is very hard to find a plot of the value of the dollar over time when priced in gold. Especially since I wanted a yearly data set going back to before the Federal Reserve was instituted in 1913. I wound up having to make my own by collecting the price of gold for all the years and doing my own math in a spreadsheet and plotting that.
The resulting plot was very interesting. One can clearly see a flat line back when the US was on a gold standard at $20 per (troy) ounce and when it was devalued to $50 per ounce. (That's actually the official face value of gold coins even today. If you look at something like a 2025 gold Eagle, which is a 1 ounce gold coin being sold now by the US mint, you'll see "50 dollars" on the face of it. Of course nobody actually spends it as $50.)
More interesting - and the reason I started the project in the first place - is that you can clearly see when the country officially dropped the gold standard in 1971. After that the value of the dollar was allowed to "float" at market rates. That's fine but it has down and to the right ever since. It is clear from the graph that the value of the dollar dropped off a cliff after 1971. People clearly would have been better off if they'd been allowed to keep their gold instead of being forced to trade them for paper.
Also note the huge, nearly vertical drop between 1971 and 1980. Those were the "stagflation" years, during which the value of dollars dropped by well over 50%. (At least in terms of gold.) In 1971 the value of a dollar was 1 dollar per 0.025 ounce. In 1980 the value of a dollar had dropped to 0.00163 ounce. That's a drop of 15x in less than 10 years! That's like depositing $150 into a bank account in 1970 then climbing into a time machine and going to the future thinking that you're going to be rich, only to find out that your account in 1980 only contains $10!
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Getting very close to done on the “hide the internet cable monster” job. The cable carrier parts were delivered yesterday evening so today I put the cable runs in place and routed the cables along them. Big improvement in looks from before. Still need to replace a couple of the longer cables with shorter ones and attach the corner/joiner cover pieces to the cable carriers. I also need to cover up the hole in the wall where the Ethernet cables from the rest of the house converge / emerge. The cover that used to be there was cracked and barely holding together so I’m going to need a new one. Not a big deal but I don’t have one on hand so it’ll mean a trip to the hardware store or ordering one online. That corner has been behind a workbench and hasn’t seen daylight for a couple of decades too so cleaning and painting the wall and rug are now on the todo list. (Not necessarily in that order. ) That project will happen one day but today is not that day. It’s Sunday evening and too late to start something like that now.
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I was needing help to find an anime or movie that I saw
efaardvark replied to Nobody's topic in Anime Discussion
Sounds like what @Nobody described could be an ova called Kowarekake no Orgel, aka The Broken Music Box. The robot's name was "Flower". It's a bit of a tearjerker. -
Welcome!
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Got three more mission lapel pins from work. One is for SPHEREx. My iphone totally fails to do it justice. What looks like an orange blob in the background is actually some sort of holograph of millions of galaxies. You can move your head around a bit to change the view and the background will move so you can see the bits that were previously hidden behind the foreground artwork. It makes the pin look like you are holding a small portal looking out to somewhere in deep space. Extremely cool effect. Another one is for the 10th anniversary of SMAP. And the third is for NISAR. The text at the bottom is a bit hard to read but it says "NASA JPL ISRO". Anyone here from India?
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Saw a deer and her fawn on the lawn in front of my office today at work... I've got some home improvement supplies coming as well. Supposed to be here today but they didn't make it. It's ok. I'm not ready anyway!
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Just a sandwich.. ham and cheese and lettuce and pepperoni on wheat with mustard and mayo. Had some lettuce left over that didn't look like it'd last much longer so I made a small salad to go with it. Bacon bits and ranch dressing on the salad, with a sprinkle of grated Parmesan on top. Diet cherry pepsi to wash it all down. Basic but yummy.
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