Daynotes On A Budget, V6.0

I guess that's me.   For years, I've relied on a simple CAD tool I downloaded a few years ago.  It's called CadStd Lite - yes, it's Freeware.  That old thing.   I do not do any sort of professional design.  I do not do anything that requires full-up 3D modeling.  Primarily because when I think of the things I'm going to make, I think of them as 2D views on graph paper.  Which means anything I make that's rather complex takes up more than a few sheets. The thing I absolutely love about CadStd is it works like my brain does.  I can define the grid as some specific measurement, and design on that.  In most of my projects, 1/4" is plenty of detail for me.  Some do require I go to 1/8", while a very few have required more detail.  But it does it. The trick is that it's a simple program.  I can draw shapes, which in my mind are 3/4" plywood sheets, 3/4" hardwood, or maybe a 3 1/2" x 3 1/2" post here and there, or ... well, ...

Now we see Musk's true colors.  Guess we'll know exactly where he stands, so I suppose it's all well and good that platform is done.  I've been reading a lot of the news about this, and it's pretty clear that the company he now owns lacks the staff to follow through on any of the legal agreements they've made. Mind you, there's a small part in the back of my mind that saw this coming, and sees the future strategy.  Musk will undoubtedly claim, once the legal roadblocks are tossed back in his way, that he no longer has the staff to follow through on these agreements.  Which we should probably simply fix by redirecting any traffic for Twitter to a billboard site saying that due to inability of the organization to maintain standards it had previously agreed to maintain, it no longer has a right to use the internet.   Sure, the entire base idea about the internet is a robust network that routes traffic around outages.  However, due to legalities, I'm certa...

Seems that someone finally closed the window to all the warmth, and we're cooling down.   I do remember a particularly warm early December a few years ago when I cleaned out the garage so I could park the car in it.  Which was ironic, because the house was built in the late 70s, but included a "two car garage" which was only two cars if both were subcompact.  In order to fit my car into the garage, I had to park with the front bumper over the first step into the house, which meant the back bumper was just far enough in to miss the fins on the garage door, so it could close. So yeah, that was fun.  Two weeks ago we were looking at record warm temperatures, this past week we had thunderstorms, but the temperature is finally heading towards winter cold.  So that's fine, we're used to it, though they still sting. I am still bumbling along here, after the earlier diarrhea of the keyboard earlier this week.  Seems some of the adults have returned to the voti...

Leadership Pro Tip: If your organization has recently held layoffs, do NOT schedule a same-day meeting for a very large group with a vague subject, no guidance for the content of the meeting, arrive 7 minutes late, and discuss upcoming future changes to the organization in vague terms.   Yeah, how was YOUR Wednesday?  I woke up glad to know I wouldn't be seeing any political ads for at least two weeks, before they start all over again.  Got upstairs, and discovered my older puppy had some ... well, let's just say elimination issues with regards to a rather rich ... dietary enhancement SOMEONE (not I) gave him.  We could call it that, or we could call it "Poo-palooza".  Yeah.  You do not need further details. But after I cleaned the carpet, got the dogs fed, out in the rain, fed myself, and got punched in to work, I get a rather urgent meeting invite. The subject is vague, the invitation from someone who is not in my normal circle of communication, and ...

I haven't seen all of the election returns yet - I'm the old fashioned sort who would much rather get up in the morning and see the results.  The constant yammering back and forth and guesses - I know the experts prefer the term "projections" but look, I got a great big projection just above my belt which is about as useful as theirs is when it comes to guessing who's gonna win.  I can guess, and I'll probably be about as right.  The biggest difference is that I cost a heck of a lot less, hold a whole lot less authority, and waste a lot less time.  I don't have to fill six or so hours of television with my "well, with the latest returns in, Fred is ahead of Ginger, but the margin is too close to call."  That's what we used to call "they'll announce the results in the morning." The main issues I see in the world these days are really all tracing back to empathy.  And how we've somehow lost the ability to teach that.  Given th...

It seems I may have been an influencer in social media!  Well, I suppose I was when I left Twitter a couple years ago and didn't say anything about it... But I found this article on CNN today that had the author celebrating her new freedom.  Can't blame her.   I think it may have been around 2015 or 2016 when Twitter really started to stink.  I got on that platform back in the early 2000s, if I recall correctly, another option to dip my toes into the then-new "social network" stuff that was happening.  I very quickly followed my friends who had intrigued me into joining the ... well, back then it was a sort of small club.  I did follow a few celebrities I thought were interesting. And the one fellow whom I followed who really helped to clear my sinuses was Chris Kluwe.  Mr. Kluwe was a punter for the Minnesota Vikings.  Back then, anyway.  He was also something of a gamer.  As in, when we used to use that term to apply to a specifi...

Yup.  Not much of worth going on around here today.   Well, I lie a little.  I postponed some of the cooking tasks for this weekend from yesterday to today, so I got all of that done.   I'm a diabetic.  I've been watching my blood sugars regularly, but every so often I get into ruts, and things tend to get a bit wonky.   For about the past year, I'd found a quick-and-easy sort of breakfast.  For some time, I'd been making myself a rather large batch of what my son calls "Dad's Quiche" - so what I did was start with a couple of pie crusts down on the bottom of a rather large pan.  That pan is also typically used for Tater Tot Hot Dish when I feel particularly naughty.  But when I'm trying to control things, I start with a pie crust - two, actually, the pre-made sort you find in the store.  I slice off the overlaps and place them over the empty spots, then I carefully place about 3 pounds of pre-cooked breakfast sausage (tha...

I doubt I'm the only one, but I remember rather fondly having to pull a handle on a refrigerator to get it to open.  Mind you, I was a child, and this was my grandmother's refrigerator.  I did end up buying one - temporarily - while on campus in college.  I think I spent something like $50 to buy this refrigerator which I expected to own forever - or that was the theory because it became an artistic and linguistic endeavor.  Or so I imagined it did when my friends started signing and writing statements/sayings on the thing when we were bored.   But as the technology has evolved (and become somewhat less reliable, I note), that latch went the way of the dodo.  Or, kids, that means it's not all that popular any longer.  And for me, it became somewhat more necessary.  As in, I needed something to do it, because I had a freezer in the garage which might see a visitor several times a day - or not hardly at all.  So there was a challenge for m...

For much of my early life, I did not understand what the deal was with people and pets.  I wanted to, deeply, but my folks were of the opinion that none of their children showed enough maturity to care for a pet.  It took a number of years before the great cluestick of Duh struck me over the head and I got it. My father was born in 1922.  My mother in 1927.  Which meant that during the Great Depression, Dad was old enough to see what was happening in the world.  My mother's earliest memories were of deprivation and scarcity.  My father's father, my "paternal grandfather" was a county employee who worked for the court system and lived within walking distance of the Courthouse.  So the family did live in town, but walked nearly everywhere they needed to go.  Except to their vacation home in the country.  But we'll get to that in a bit. My mother's family lived in the same town.  Her father worked for the railroad.  And as such, it was...