The sweet, sweet benefits of aging

 Yesterday, while working on a MacGyvered sprinkler system to keep my lawn and plants alive while I go away for a month, I had the greatest idea for a blog post.  That's one I really want to get out there, I thought.  My readers, all three of you, will love this one.

Yeah.  Exactly.  No clue whatsoever.  I'm not even sure what the category might have been, let alone the specific topic.

Oh well.  

Also, in case you were wondering, cobbling together a sprinkler system instead of having one dug into the ground, is a royal PITA.  I did, however, finally get it done.  Only to find out that the four zone timer I had bought was counting in seconds instead of minutes.  Sprinkler activates as expected, runs for fifteen seconds, shuts back down.  And of course I had bought the last one.  Hopefully the store in the next town has one on the shelf.  

Microsoft OneDrive is a bunch of happy horsesh!t

 Bought a new laptop last year.  Been working with it for the past several months.  Suddenly found out that half my stuff is stored on Microsoft's Onedrive.  I didn't ask for that but presumably agreed to it during setup when you have to agree to a half a million things in order to use your new computer.

Now I can't get rid of it.

De-linked Onedrive from my computer, all my stuff disappeared.

Re-linked and it came back.

Went into the Settings for Onedrive and told it I wanted local access to all my files.  Not sure if it's doing anything and the Documents, Desktop, and Pictures folders, plus who knows what else, all still show  folder path as including OneDrive.

I'm trying to change the settings so that everything is stored on my computer, but I am finding, now, two of each folder, and they have different contents.  There's the OneDrive set of folders, which have everything; and there's the plain old users/me folders which don't.  The Download folders seem to be the same; the non-OneDrive Pictures folder doesn't even seem to exist; the Documents folders are completely different.

So apparently Microsoft decided to create a cloud file storage structure, barely mentioning it when the customer buys a new computer, which is almost impossible to leave, without losing stuff.  This is such BS and now I'm tired of messing with it when I could be doing something productive.  So I will walk away, having wasted the last 45 minutes, and start all over again at some future time, wasting even more time.

Thanks Microsoft.  Any wonder that people hate you?

My solutions to the 2025 AP Calculus Free Response questions

No guarantee of accuracy.  Click on the images for a larger version.

 

Well said

 You want warriors without wounds. Generals without scars. You want clean war: without sin, without suffering, without the cost.

https://x.com/infantrydort/status/1924072477753479298 

Rare sense from CATO

 CATO is a libertarian think tank.  The folks over there pretty much hate Donald Trump as President, near as I can tell.  Part of the problem is that they seem to be immigration absolutists, attacking any effort to stem any kind of immigration, legal or illegal.  I read their stuff, however, for the occasional rational article about shrinking government.  

It is in this area where they have historically been the most convincing, but with the advent of PDT and DOGE, some of their authors have jumped the shark, opposing efforts to shrink the federal bureaucracy, apparently because of their aforementioned hatred of the President.

A recent article suggests that perhaps encouraging more cooperation between DOGE and Congress, as well as concrete strategies to put DOGE's efforts on a more sustainable path, are in order.  Well written, well reasoned, acknowledging the libertarian advances of the DOGE efforts while analyzing the issues.

Recommended read or listen.

https://www.cato.org/blog/libertarians-doge-anxiety-disorder

ABE Books: A review

Short version: Not happy!

Longer version: I bought three books from ABE Books, which has, for some years, been a subsidiary of Amazon.  One of the books arrived with multiple pages cut out of the book.  It looked like a kid had wanted paper animals shapes, perhaps with printed letters covering them, perhaps for an art project, and had taken a razor blade to the inside of the book.  I was in no rush to get the books as they are a present for a friend's children, so filed a return request.  For a $7 book they insisted that I mail it back, rather than just provide pictures of the damage.  So I did. At a cost of $4.63, at which point they promptly refunded me my $7.

So I had to pay $4.63 to get ... nothing.

1/5 Stars for checking their product to make sure it is acceptable before shipping

1/5 Stars for making their customers incur costs to fix their own mistakes.

1/5 Stars for the lack of response to my complaint (no return email to even acknowledge that I am unhappy)

Recommendation: Avoid

Oh, and their website does not have any provision for rating your experience, so that should tell you something.

Wildfires - a chart for your viewing pleasure

 With all the talk of climate change and the increases in wildfires, this might come in handy next time you are having a discussion.

And while we're at it, might as well add in drought.

And federal logging.

Graphs courtesy of 

https://wattsupwiththat.com/increase-in-u-s-wildfires-due-to-climate-change/