The weather hasn’t lessened the Spring cleaning, at least inside The Gulch, as the WP Mom and I have been slowly going through all of the stuff in one of our attics and trying to dispose of stuff we don’t want or need. Most of it has been ‘junk’ that should have been disposed of years ago, stuff the WP Parents brought with them from their move up from the WP Clan beach house in Connecticut 20 years ago, but once ensconced in the attic was promptly forgotten about. Of course I have had an ulterior motive for cleaning out the attic, that being making room for my stuff which is still being stored in a rental storage unit. (Not all that stuff is mine as my ex has stuff stored there as well. I am trying very hard to have it emptied before Labor Day weekend so I can stop paying to rent it, saving me $170 each month.)
Spring cleaning also means pulling up all of the rugs on the ground floor, getting them ‘cleaned’ (hanging them up and beating them to get rid of as much dust and dirt as possible), and vacuuming and washing the floors, something long overdue.
Oh, and next weekend I plan to launch the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout to start the boating season.
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It is “Computer Weekend” here at The Gulch as I have been spending time setting up and staging the two MicroPCs I bought last week.
One of the things I found out before I started on them was that the two units - an Ace Magician and Kamrui microPC - had factory-loaded malware installed, at least in the past. The units come with Windows 11 and for a stretch of time, one of the contractors employed to load the Solid State Drives slipped malware into the images used to install the Windows OS. Fortunately a number of YouTube channels, including the one linked above, warned about this and showed how to scan the drives to find and remove the malware. The malware would steal user names and passwords from browsers as well as cryptocurrency wallet information and forward it to a server overseas. Supposedly newer models from the manufacturer of these two brands have made sure no such malware is on their computers, something I confirmed when I scanned the drives on the two machines and they came up clean. (Two scanning programs were used – Sophos’ HitmanPro and Microsoft’s Malicious Software Removal Tool, both of which can be run from a USB key.)
Not that I am going to be using Windows 11 on either machine, something I mentioned in last week’s TOAS. Instead I will be loading Linux Mint as I have little faith on Windows 11, particularly after finding out just how intrusive it can be, and as more than a few people have mentioned, the embedded ads that keep popping when using various programs, something I find to be quite annoying. (I see this on the Windows 10 laptop I use for work, though I think the ads I see on that computer are due to the browser being used, selected by my company’s IT department, and not Windows itself. But it has given me a preview of what we can expect with Win 11.)
Hopefully I can get both machines up and running before next weekend. There is a lot of data to be copied from the old machines, e-mail accounts to set up, and needed programs installed including Thunderbird for e-mail, Brave for web browsing, and LibreOffice for an office suite. (I have been using OpenOffice and its derivative, LibreOffice, for some time and have found them to be a great alternative to Microsoft’s Office suite. So far I haven’t found anything that I can do on Office 365 than I can’t do on LibreOffice. But then again I am not using everything on Office 365, so I can only speak to those apps I am actually using.)
It will be interesting to see how all of this works out. At the moment I have high hopes, but only time will tell.
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As Glenn Reynolds put it, “Screaming campus garbage babies living up to their name.”
Unsurprisingly, the various protest groups on campuses around the nation left tons of trash behind, with over 8000 pounds of trash left behind at Humboldt University alone. It seems leftists expect others, meaning anyone who is not one of them, to pick up after them.
As the Instaprof wrote:
I remember when Tea Party protesters left sites cleaner than they found them, and the press and our national deep thinkers called them barbarians.What do you expect from spoiled children whose parents never told them “No”?
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How far has Biden fallen in the eyes of the voting public (at least the live voting public)?
This far.
It’s getting bad for the *Resident when both sides at a protest are chanting “F*ck Joe Biden”.
It’s getting bad for the *Resident when a reporter asks a union worker “What’s your message to Joe Biden?” and the union worker responds “Fuck You.”
It only gets worse from there.
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Any of you who have been reading this blog for any length of time know, I am not enamored of EVs or the Biden Administration’s push to force us out of our ICE cars and trucks and into EVs despite those same EVs not being the answer to climate change nor being what the motoring public either wants or needs. EVs aren’t green. They are more expensive to buy, repair, and insure. To show you just bad it can get, there’s this: Door Ding Causes EV SUV to be Totaled by Insurance Company:
Door dings and minor auto body damage occur frequently in daily driving. Typically, insurance companies manage the repairs without much fuss. However, when the vehicle in question is a Fisker Ocean, things can go very bad, very quickly, and that’s exactly what happened in this instance.It seems many EVs are totaled by insurance companies for damage that, had they occurred to an ICE vehicle, would have been repaired. Some of that has to do with how some EVs are built which increases the complexity and cost of repairs, and some to do with the possible damage to the battery pack which can turn an EV into a rolling incendiary device. Is it any wonder why insurance companies don’t want to risk something like this? It certainly explains why they’ll total an EV and charge much higher premiums for EVs.
After someone hit Joy Wanner’s Ocean while the door was open, the damage appeared to be minor. But lo and behold, less than a month later, the insurance company deemed the electric SUV from the struggling startup teetering on the brink of bankruptcy a total loss.
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Gee, I wonder how much of an effect high gas prices will have on the election, particularly if those high gas prices are here at election time?
I had to get gasoline in my 2010 Ford F-150 yesterday evening, which worked out to $106.03 for 32.141 gallons; that was $3.299 per gallon, and that included 10¢ off per gallon with my Kroger points. Naturally, I took a picture of the numbers on the pump, and tweeted it out, saying that it was yet another reason to retire Joe Biden.From a post I made a couple of weeks ago comes this suggestion: All voting should be held at gas stations.
When I opened my Facebook account this morning, I saw that I had posted, on May 1, 2020, that 87 Octane regular unleaded gasoline was $1.479 per gallon in Estill County, Kentucky that day.
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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where more boats are appearing at docks every day, mine will be one of them next weekend, and where Monday is returning...yet again.